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SCALING CONSERVATION

A landscape restored. A future reimagined.

Look out from the garden of Blackburn Cottage and what you see is a valley in remarkable shape — vivid green fields, mature woodland, dry stone walls running along the contours of the hill, and forest stretching to the horizon. It is a working landscape with deep roots and real beauty.

It is also a landscape at the beginning of something new.

Blackburn & Hartsgarth Estate spans 11,400 acres of the Scottish Borders uplands. For much of its history it was managed intensively — driven grouse shooting, upland grazing — a pattern of land use that left much of the moorland fragmented, peatlands degraded, and biodiversity diminished. The rivers and burns that wind through the valley below still run through a landscape that has been gradually stripped of the structure and variety it once held.

Oxygen Conservation acquired Blackburn & Hartsgarth with a clear and long-term purpose: to restore the natural systems of this vast estate, rebuild its biodiversity, and demonstrate that large upland landscapes can play a meaningful role in addressing the climate and nature crises, while creating genuine value for local communities and the visitors who come to be part of this place.

What we're doing

Woodland Restoration
Native woodland is currently scarce across the estate, despite ideal conditions along its burns, streams, and lower slopes. Working with expert planting partners TreeStory, we are restoring and expanding native forest at scale: 1.6 million broadleaf trees — downy birch, hazel, rowan, Scots pine, and sessile oak — bringing woodland cover to approximately 20% of the estate over time. This is not blanket planting. It is carefully considered restoration, reconnecting habitats, stabilising riverbanks, and creating a mosaic of woodland and open moorland where wildlife can truly thrive.

Peatland Restoration
The peatlands of Blackburn & Hartsgarth are among the estate’s most important and most damaged habitats. Healthy peat is one of the UK’s greatest natural carbon stores, but degraded peat emits carbon. Working with Caledonian Climate, we are undertaking large-scale restoration: rewetting, drain blocking, and erosion repair to return the upland bogs to functioning blanket peat. Over time this will turn a carbon source into a carbon sink, restore hydrology across the hills, and support the specialist plant and bird communities that depend on healthy moorland.

Renewable Energy
In partnership with Low Carbon, we are exploring large-scale onshore wind development on the estate — a project capable of generating clean energy for the next 50 years, and providing sustained long-term funding for nature recovery across the landscape. Our approach is grounded in rigorous environmental assessment and landscape-sensitive design, ensuring that energy generation and biodiversity goals work together, not against each other.

MINIMISING OUR FOOTPRINT

Not just sustainable, but regenerative practices.

We eagerly anticipate your arrival at Blackburn and Hartsgarth, where you can witness our ambitious landscape-scale conservation vision firsthand, engage with nature as it flourishes back to full health, and indulge in the luxurious comforts provided by our sustainable and regenerative practices. Like all our ecotourism offerings, we are committed to minimising our footprint as much as possible.

 

  • Our cleaning supplies and toiletries are all as environmentally friendly as possible, and we ensure that our on-site team utilise sustainable and eco-friendly practices.

  • We source as many ingredients as possible from the local area, or even the estate itself.

  • A borehole provides fresh drinking water, and we recycle as much as possible.

  • In terms of transportation, EV charging points are also available on-site.