The estate

Hawksfold sits at Fernhurst, just north of Midhurst, inside the South Downs National Park, in that in-between country where the sandy heaths and oak woods of the western Weald run up against the chalk. The land here has been worked for centuries — the field names, the sunken lanes and the coppice stools in our woods all say so. Hawksfold today is forty acres of that country — home to the Hill-Haimes family, who are sympathetically restoring the whole of it, piece by patient piece: the house, the cottage and outbuildings, the ancient woodland, the hedges and the fields.

Today the estate is a working patchwork: permanent pasture grazed lightly, hedgerows left tall and thick, ponds and ditches kept wet, and woodland managed on a slow rotation of thinning and coppicing. It isn't a manicured landscape and it isn't meant to be. The scruffy corners — the bramble banks, the standing deadwood, the rushy field edges — are exactly where the wildlife lives.

Everything we do here comes back to the same idea: the estate should pay for its own care, in ways that make it richer rather than poorer.

• Stays. Our first cottage — Lower Hawksfold Cottage — opened to guests through Airbnb, and it has looked after visitors so well that we're expanding to ten places to stay: cottages and lofts around the old farmyard, cabins in the wood, a shepherd's hut out on the pasture. Each one is being brought on slowly, using estate timber and local trades where we can.
• Hides. We're building five bird-watching hides across the estate — over the ponds, into the oak wood, and along the rough margins the barn owls quarter at dusk. They're for staying guests to wander down to, and for visiting birders and photographers to book by the session.
• Kindling. The thinnings and coppice from our woodland become kindling and firewood — cut, split and barn-dried here, and sold through our online shop. It's woodland management you can warm your house with.

We keep chemicals to a minimum, cut hedges on rotation rather than annually, and leave wide uncut margins around every field. The woods are worked in small coupes so there is always young growth, standing timber and deadwood side by side — the mix that woodland birds, bats and insects actually need. The ponds are kept open and unshaded on their south sides for dragonflies and the kingfisher that works them.

The bird hides are part of the same thinking. Watching wildlife pays a little towards the habitat that supports it, and every hide is sited to keep people comfortable and the birds undisturbed: screened approaches, no flash, and honest guidance about what you might see and when.

The best way to understand Hawksfold is to stay a while. Walk the permissive paths before breakfast, sit in a hide at dusk, light the woodburner with kindling that grew a few hundred yards from your door. And when you head out, you're five minutes from Midhurst and inside one of England's newest and loveliest national parks — our area guides will point you in the right directions.