England Travel | Discover Haye Cornwall’s Vegan Retreat & Animal Rescue | Kate Hinze

Link for the show notes

In today’s episode of The World Vegan Travel Podcast, we’re heading to the lush valleys of Cornwall, England, to meet Kate Hinze, founder of Haye Cornwall. Kate runs a small animal sanctuary and retreat where rescued ponies, donkeys, chickens, and pigs share their home with guests staying in a cozy holiday cottage or joining transformative wellness retreats.
We’ll talk about the unique way Haye Cornwall blends compassionate animal care, land regeneration, and visitor experiences, and how holidays here not only support the animals but also offer people the chance to slow down, reconnect with nature, and explore Cornwall’s gentler landscapes. Kate will share what guests can expect when they visit — from hands-on time with the animals to nearby treasures like Golitha Falls, Whitsand Bay, and historic sites such as Tintagel Castle.
Whether you’re curious about sustainable sanctuary life, looking for a holiday that makes a difference, or dreaming of a peaceful escape surrounded by animals and nature, you’ll love hearing Kate’s story and the ethos behind Haye Cornwall.

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Transcript

00:00:00] Hello Kate and welcome to The World Vegan Travel Podcast. 
Thank you so much for having me.
I am really excited to have you on to talk about your project that you have, the business that you have, what you do, and also a little bit about where this amazing business is located.
It's in a beautiful part of the world. To get us started, Kate, can you tell us a little bit about what Haye Cornwall is and how you came to create this very special place?
Absolutely. So we're a small animal sanctuary, obviously based in Cornwall, given the name. And when we set up, we were very clear that we weren't gonna be one of these massive sanctuaries that took on loads of animals and got enormously overwhelmed. We want to
be responsible in what we're doing. So that means we have to be financially, emotionally, and physically capable of taking care of every animal that we have. From a financial perspective, it [00:01:00] needs to be self-sustaining.
We both still have day jobs, but we can't have all that money going towards the animals. So we have a small holiday cottage that we rent out, and people can have private, unique holidays in the cottage. It's sleeps six, and we like that to have an atmosphere of people coming to stay with their favorite aunt and uncle in the country, and having a chance to hang out with the animals, and have adventures on the land. In the off-season we do wellness retreats. So we do a variety. We've got one in September that's a wild swimming and walking one, which we're really excited about, and then we have other retreats that are based on yoga and meditation, and cacao ceremonies, and setting intentions and things like that. So that's what we do. It came about because we're vegan, and we wanted to rescue animals. I particularly wanted to rescue farm animals. It hasn't quite gone that way. We've accidentally focused on equines because we accidentally acquired some ponies and [00:02:00] donkeys, and it went from there. We were really conscious that we were incredibly lucky to be able to do this, and we wanted to be able to share it with people. Equally it needed to be financially self-sustaining. So it seemed obvious that to have the cottage was the way forward.
Can you explain to our listeners where Cornwall is and what the countryside around you is? Because I imagine, that if you have horses and donkeys, you must have quite a large amount of land. I guess it would be ideal to have a lot of land if you had cows and pigs, et cetera. But horses, I believe, if I understand well, they need a lot of land.
They do 
need a fair bit of land. So we've got 25 acres. Yeah, it's quite a lot. But we have about five acres that we keep the donkeys, and ponies, and pig, and chickens on. We keep the donkeys and ponies on a track system. So with all the animals, as much as possible, we try and mimic their natural habitat.
Now, [00:03:00] obviously in the world, ponies and donkeys wouldn't live on a track, but they would walk a long way. I think it's about 20 miles a day in order to get food. 
So instead of putting them in a field and just letting them put their head down and munch grass all day, we have circular tracks, and we have hay stations around the tracks.
 They have to go from one to the other in order to get their food. They're constantly foraging. We give them ad lib hay so that they never run out of hay. And we do lots of foraging for them. We cut down willow, and hazel they like, and beech they like, and we put that in different places in the fences, and we hang it in the trees that they can't reach. We put in sticky weed. You may not know what sticky weed is. It's called different things around the world. It's the stuff your siblings will have stuck to you when you were a child, and it's awful.
When I was a child in the UK, we called it 'sticky bud.' 
Yes. Yeah. We called it sticky weed where I grew up. I think some people call it sticky willy or something like that as well. And it's horrible, but they love it. And actually, it's really nice in a [00:04:00] drink. I've discovered it in the spring when it's fresh, so that's nice. So we do lots of foraging for them.
But yes, we do have a lot of land. Cornwall is the southwest pointy bit of England. It's the bit, that when you look at the map, is like the trotters of a pig that's being ridden by a witch. That's how people describe it. We are just over the border from Devon. So we're at the fat end of the pig before it goes down. It's absolutely beautiful here. We are in a rolling valley, and I went out
and shouted for somebody this morning, and I could hear my voice echoing across the whole valley. So everybody could hear that I was shouting for someone called John. I'm surprised nobody answered. It rains quite a lot because we get the winds off the Atlantic. We tend to get the weather that hits the UK first, and the UK being what it is, that tends to be quite wet. So as a result, we're very green, but we also get a lot of sunshine. And at the moment it's 28 degrees and beautiful outside.
Oh my goodness. How lovely. [00:05:00] How lovely. You offer such a unique experience, part animal sanctuary, part holiday, cottage, part retreat space. What can people expect when they stay with you? Maybe it looks a little bit different depending whether they're just hiring the cottage or whether they're participating in a retreat.
Yes, if people stay in the cottage, it's a really nice cottage and it's very clean, but it's not epic luxury. We don't have a Nespresso machine or anything fancy like that, but it's very functional. People are welcome to make use of the garden. We have a huge, beautiful garden with a trampoline and big wildlife pond. At the moment, the blackcurrents are in season, so they're welcome to help themselves to the blackcurrents. They are very welcome to get up with us in the morning to do the first round of feeding. So for example, we've just had a family staying with us who left earlier today. They helped me give Buddy the pig, his breakfast. And then, yeah, he's so cute. Then, they will distract the donkeys with some hay. They'll hand feed the donkeys with hay while I muck out the barn. [00:06:00] They put out the food for the chickens and they help me stop the cockerel from attacking my legs. Well, they put out this, oh, he's a whole other thing. Then we poo pick the paddock that the ponies have been in overnight, and then they go onto that. So they have a paddock that's completely brown with no grass because the pig goes in there during the day. So we poo pick it in the morning and put them onto the track. We then let Buddy out of his stable. We scattered the food around in his paddock for second breakfast. So we let him out, and he trots all by himself. He needs no guidance, no encouragement. Comes out of his stable around the corner, and into his paddock. And then we shut the gate. Then they help with the lunchtime checks, and feeding, and the tea time checks, and feeding, and they can help put them away. And in between times, they can go off to the beach. We've got beautiful beaches here. Because we're South Coast of Cornwall, not North Coast, our sea tends to be a lot calmer. So the North Coast is beautiful and is [00:07:00] amazing for surfing, and bodyboarding, and wave jumping. You can surf and bodyboard down here, but generally, the water tends to be more conducive to swimming and splashing about. We get a lot of paddle boarders come down here as well. There's so many things to see around here. We are near a place called Golitha Falls, which is a water fall, but it's not like Victoria Falls, like big crashing falls. It's a series of small falls before the Fowey river. And you can paddle, and it's in an area of rainforest. Natural rainforest.
Wow. Rainforest in the UK.
 We've got quite a few actually. And the one in Golitha Falls, it's always beautiful and cool in there because the waterfall creates the moisture in the air and all the trees are covered in green. It's like a moss. It's just, it's magical there.
Oh wow.
And it's quite spiritual, is probably the wrong word. Let's say Celtic area of Cornwall. There's lots of stone circles that nobody knows why they're [00:08:00] there. There's lots of legends, but nobody really knows. There's lots of neolithic settlements. Bodmin Moor is absolutely stunning.
And even on a hot day, there's a beautiful breeze up there, and you can see from miles and miles. So if people come for a holiday, they've got plenty to do on top of just hanging out with the rescue animals. And if people come for a wellness retreat, it's very structured. We've done quite a few now, over the last two years. People will turn up on the Friday and they meet the animals, and then on the Saturday we alternate between doing a wellness activity like yoga or cacao or meditation or some sort of relaxation. In between that, they'll get a guided tour of the 25 acres where they'll see some of the land regeneration projects we're doing, like hedge laying. We do dead hedging. We planted 91 trees last year, which sounds like a lot, but actually we knocked it out in a day. So we were a bit like, 'Oh, we should have got more.' Then in between that, I [00:09:00] split them into very small groups and we go in, we do very close up stuff with the animals. We show them how we look after the animals using positive reinforcement training, which is a clicker training for your dog. It's exactly the same thing, but I don't click. I don't use a clicker. ' I can't handle the animal, the clicker, the treats, the guests, everything. So I just make a noise instead. We use that for cooperative care with the animals so we don't have to tie them up to do things. They're all very willing to give us their hooves so we can clean them out. We move Buddy the pig around by making it fun for him to move, rather than with forcing him in different directions. We lure him. It's much easier. Even the chickens are whistle trained. If I whistle, the chickens will come running from all directions of the farm. 
My goodness. You touched on so many things there. Yeah, it's a lot. I'm so curious. Could you talk more about the regeneration and rewilding projects that you are doing there? I'm not an [00:10:00] expert, but the small amount that I've read, it feels like, if we can just be rewilding more of our countrysides, especially in places like the UK and Europe where there is not a lot of wilderness or natural places left, it could really solve a lot of the world's problems. So I'm curious, do you agree with that? And if you do, what is it that you are doing, and what are some of the benefits that you are seeing from your efforts?
So I think it's a really good point that you make. People are tending not to call it rewilding anymore, they tend to call it land regeneration. The problem with rewilding, you're not really putting it back into a completely wild state. The problem in this country in particular, is that we've lost so much of the animals that would manage the land, that you can't go, 'Okay, here's 20 acres. We are just not gonna do anything with it anymore.' [00:11:00] Because it will literally just turn to nettles and brambles and dogs. Which have their place, and there's nothing wrong with nettles and brambles and dogs. But you don't really want massive fields, open fields full of them, because that's not encouraging diversity. So what you need to do is, there's a book called Rewilding by Isabella Tree, which you've probably read or heard of. And she works on Knepp, which is an old dairy farm, and they started the rewilding movement. But I think, even she calls it regeneration now. One of the things that they talk about is, if you don't have a beaver to do the work that a beaver would do, you have to be the beaver. So we have to be the beaver. Where you get a hedge that gets out of control, you have to do what the animals would do, as in they would nibble it down. Well, we can't nibble it down, can we? So we have to cut it and relay it. And although hedges aren't necessarily a natural part of the landscape, [00:12:00] they're very important because they create wildlife corridors, for example. Take it back to that state. So we're trying to regenerate some of the hedges around the land. In terms of the fields. When we first moved down here, we were approached by a local cattle farmer who historically used to cut the grass for the previous owner, and then would take it away to his farm. And he said, 'Would you consider renting out the fields for me to put heifers on?' Which are young cow who've never been in calf. And we said, yes. In all honesty, we wish we hadn't because it's not part of our veganism anymore. We feel like we've evolved past that. But having said that, they are part of the land regeneration project.
So they keep the grass down. They keep the overzone grass that farmers would've put into meadows years ago, like perennial rye, which is not a natural grass. It's incredibly hard wearing. It's incredibly sweet. It grows so quickly, it [00:13:00] crowds out the wild flowers and the other natural grasses as well. So they keep all that grass low and that gives everything else a chance to come up.
Really, that's surprising. 
So sheep do something very similar, and sheep are actually much better at it than cows because they're not quite as destructive. Sheep are on my list for next year. So the cows keep the grass down and then at the end of the summer we seed with wildflower mixes. The idea is, grass goes down, wild flowers have a chance to come up over the winter.
It's been really interesting. The problem is that we've had such mild winters, the last few winters, that it doesn't drop below six degrees here very much, and grass will keep growing over six degrees. So we still have an issue, come the spring where the grass didn't really stop over the winter.
It just kept growing. So we start the spring with a lot of grass, which then is a bit of a challenge for the wild [00:14:00] flowers and the grasses to come through. So it's been really interesting, and you have to learn patience when you're working with nature. You can't rush it, and if it doesn't work one year, you have to wait a year before you can try it again. What we have found though, is that it is working in parts of the land, so you can see where the clover is coming up a lot more than it used to. And really interestingly, when we first got the pig, we put him out in one of the meadows and he trashed, like he trashed a huge chunk of it. He turned over loads of it, but where he turned it over, now this spring and summer, we've had much better results with the wild flowers than in previous years. So this winter we're going to put the pig in, and hopefully he's going to contribute. He's going to earn his keep by turning the meadow over, and hopefully that will help with the regeneration. 
That is absolutely fascinating. Honestly, yeah. Yeah, it's [00:15:00] really interesting. And just another reminder that it's really hard to fix these problems. It's so hard. There's been thousands and thousands of years of animal grazing and agriculture, and recently, mass agriculture and monoculture and these kinds of things.
It's not really surprising. It's so difficult. I admire your patience and commitment to do this kind of thing. It must feel like a real slog at times. I'm sure there's plenty of rewarding things, but knowing myself, if I was in your position, I'd probably be like, 'Oh no, I've gotta start from scratch again.'
But, I guess that's probably why you are doing something like this and not me. 
I have to be honest, I very much felt that way with my veggie garden. One of the things I really wanted to do down here, was a permaculture veg garden, and it was beautiful for the first year. It was wonderful. We had so much veg, and it was [00:16:00] absolutely stunning. And then the following year, because I'd improved the soil by putting donkey poo on it, and we do no-till, so we just put the poo on the soil. 
Well, it was great because then the worms came, but when you get worms, you then get moles. And when the moles came, they dug up all my veg beds and just scattered it all across the paddock. And I went, 'Okay, I'll do it again. I'll do it again.' So I did the whole thing again, put it all back, got it all ready, and they did it again.
And at that point then, that season, I had 250 seedlings in the greenhouse, desperate to go outside. I just put them outside and went, whatever happens. And the slugs ate every single seedling, everything, absolutely everything, and my heart was broken. And at that point I thought, do you know what? I've got the cottage, I've got the animals. I don't have time for this nonsense. When I can go to Aldi and buy two kilos of carrots for 60 P, why am I messing about with this? Until I can do this on proper scale, I've given up on veg [00:17:00] growing, and now the pig is in that paddock, and it's a disaster looking of a paddock. I think it's much more productive than my efforts at permaculture vegetable growing.
Permaculture is quite hard, from what I've heard. I've had a few guests on the podcast talking about permaculture, and yeah, there's a lot of learning curve, I believe. So I'm not surprised about your lack of success, even after several attempts.
It was the moles, did me in. It was like, 'Oh no, I can't do this anymore. No, we're done.'
 They're so cute. But yes, they can be quite destructive.
 Can you describe a little bit more about the lovely little holiday cottage that you have? You mentioned that it's nothing fancy, but before having this call, I went on and had a look and I thought, this is a very lovely, comfortable little cottage. So I think you may be underselling it a little bit.
Thank you. So the cottage was originally [00:18:00] a wool, potato, and apple store, attached to the original farmhouse. This is the original front door of the farmhouse. And this room, I don't want to ruin the visual, but there is an amazing fireplace over there with huge bread ovens in it.
Because this was big, substantial farm at one point, and the wool, potato, and apple store was like a mini barn, and one of the previous owners converted it into a cottage and it's three bedrooms. So we have it set up as two doubles and a twin, and it's got two bathrooms, which is great because nobody wants to queue for the bathroom in the morning. It has a small functional kitchen, and it has a little lounge, and under the stairs- it was always my dream to have a little reading nook for children. So I've got big cushions under there, and I've got like fairy lights. So it's pretty, and when children arrive, I always show them, and I always tell them, now no adults are allowed in here. This is only for you. There was the units that were in the kitchen, we had to rip out [00:19:00] because they were moldy and we had zero money when we first started doing this. So I created like a work, like a unit out of old pallet wood, and put back together. So there's like a big unit in there, and we have a very small sink. You wouldn't want to do a feast for a hundred people in there. Although, having said that, we did have a tiny wedding last year, and the Indian family who were in there, really did create a feast, and it was epic. But it's perfectly adequate for bringing your chips back from the chip shop, and eating them in the garden or having a pizza or making a nice breakfast or something. And it's got a lovely little terrace right outside the back door where I've got nice comfy chairs. It looks out over the garden, and then it looks further out over the meadows and the hill. So the view from the front of the cottage is beautiful, over greenery, and there's windows on all three sides. So one side of it is attached to our house, and then the other three sides have windows. So it's incredibly light, [00:20:00] and it gets beautiful air. People sleep like dead logs when they come here because it's so dark and so quiet. And we get people who come and they'll be like, 'I go for a run at six o'clock every morning. Where can I run?' And I'm like, 'Well, you can run up the hill, but you're probably gonna have to wear wellies when you do it.' And they're like, 'Yeah, I'm gonna go for a run. I'm gonna go for a run.' And then they appear at nine o'clock in the morning, go, 'Oh, I slept so well. It was lovely.' And you're like, 'Yeah, don't run while you're here.'
Just, yeah. Yeah. I love it. And I'm curious about when you have retreats. Where do people stay? Do they just hire out a room in the cottage? Because I assume that they're people coming from different places rather than larger groups. 
Yes. So we have the three bedrooms in the cottage, and then we have two bedrooms in the house that are sort of separate from our living area. One of the rooms in the cottage is a twin. We can do six people. Everybody has a bedroom, apart from two [00:21:00] people share. And all the retreats we've had, we've either had at least one couple or at least one pair of friends who take the twin or a couple takes the double. But we have had one retreat where someone said, I don't mind sharing with a stranger. That's no problem. And someone else said the same thing. So they shared the twin and they left best friends, which was just lovely.
Oh, lucky.
Nobody snored. So they all go into the cottage to eat together, and we've got a beautiful, we call it the space, because we don't know what else to call it. And it's got under-floor heating, wooden floor. And one wall is completely windows. And that's the west-facing wall. So it gets afternoon sun in there, and of course, it's decorated with fairy lights and I put lots of plants in there, and it's the most relaxing, beautiful place to spend some time. It's just big enough for six people and a teacher. So the retreats are very intimate. They're very small. [00:22:00] They're very conducive to people making really good friends. 
Everybody leaves with a WhatsApp group that they're all on. Everybody is friends for life afterwards. They all share things that they wouldn't normally share, and people genuinely find them transformative. We have one lady who's come, I think she's come to three of them now. And she's coming to another one in October. We have one lady who loved it so much that when she went home, she quit her job and became a full-time yoga teacher. She held her first retreat here in the spring and that was just beautiful.
And all her guests had a wonderful time. So we really combine. People come here to look inside themselves that something is missing. Yeah. People aren't happy when they go on something like this. They're generally not happy, and they're generally looking for something, and that's great, and introspection is fantastic. But by having the animals and the land, we're also getting people involved in the care of the [00:23:00] animals and the care of the land, and that encourages them to look outside themselves as well. So then they can get this balance between their own sense of self and the sense of nature around them, and then they can connect with that. They find it much easier, than I think, to discover what they're looking for inside themselves. And for a lot of people, what they just want, is a couple of days away from the city, away from the noise. Away from the light pollution. Away from the pollution. We came from North London. You never heard birdsong from our house because the traffic was too noisy, and then during lockdown it was genuinely magical. And what I really wanted when we moved down here, and we'd been planning this for years, was somewhere where I couldn't hear cars. And now the birdsong, quite frankly, is bit deafening at times. But it's wonderful, and it's so quiet here. When the birds pass overhead, you can hear their wings beat.
Wow. Wow. You have just described that so beautifully. Thank you so much, Kate. I was just in [00:24:00] Dorset recently, and my brother, he lives in the countryside, close to Bridgeport. In quite a rural area, and it just so happens that his little house in his village is surrounded by trees and everything.
Goodness me. The birds. The birds. And I woke up for the dawn chorus a few times, and England does dawn chorus very well. 
 It's really 
very special. 
We do good birds here, don't we? We're obsessed at the moment with the Merlin app. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's.
I am familiar, yes.
We quite often at dusk, go and sit outside and just have the Merlin app open and go. And that's for that. And that's for that, and that's for that. Our understanding and enjoyment of the birds has really improved since knowing what we are listening to. But it's just, you just sit there and think, 'Oh, this is wonderful.' And I genuinely believe there's a mental health epidemic among young people in this country. I think a huge part of it is this massive disconnect [00:25:00] between their lives and nature. They don't see sunrise, they don't see sunset, they don't see stars. They have no idea what the stars are like. They don't hear the birds. Their food comes in plastic. They think they like chicken, but what they really like to eat is the seasoning that goes with it, because they don't understand where it comes from. They have zero connection with it. And we love having people staying here, particularly when there are families in the cottage. And you can see the light bulb going off with kids when I put a chicken in their arms and I explain what an egg is, and where it comes from, and they cuddle Buddy the pig. We take them out to meet our neighbor's cows, and they stand in the field, and they look at our neighbor's sheep. We've had grown men go, 'Oh my God. It's just like our dog, isn't it?' Their wives are going, 'Yes.'  People can't do that unless they have access to animals and nature, and we love doing that. We love showing that to [00:26:00] people.
Yeah, I agree with you. When I compare my childhood that I had where I was born and raised in a small village in Sussex in the South Coast, which was quite a built up area, but we were just outside all of the time. And today I live in a beautiful part of the world in Canada, and we just don't really see kids running around despite the fact that it's the perfect place.
Yeah.
It's not a particularly dangerous place. The traffic isn't particularly bad. There's a lot of incentive to stay at home because of 24 7, very interesting media and computer games, which get the dopamine hit. That was what the word I was looking for. And I don't know. I use social media a lot, and I just, sometimes I'll be scrolling and I'll be like, I'm not even having fun here. I'm not [00:27:00] even impacted by anything that I'm scrolling through, what am I doing?
I have exactly the same thing. And a lot of the food, pretty much all the food I eat, is home cooked. Because we're vegan, it's so much easier, but because there's been a rise in supermarket vegan foods now, occasionally, I'll have a vegan chocolate cake from the supermarket. And the way I feel about social media is how I feel after eating that chocolate cake. It leaves a kind of nasty taste in your mouth. 
Yeah.
I go on Instagram to post for the business because people follow us, because they love the animals. 
Agreed. So Kate, you've really sold me on the reasons why I should come to stay at your property, at your cottage. That definitely sounds like my cup of tea, but it's a long way to go for a lovely accommodation and a lovely experience. Could you explain some of the other reasons why people might decide to [00:28:00] come to this part of the world?
And it doesn't just have to be about some fun, vegan food options. It can be about beautiful beaches, and museums, and all of those things as well.
 We have lovely beaches on the South Coast that are very family-friendly and water sports friendly. We've got one in particular. It's called Whitsand Bay, and it's absolutely huge. It encompasses several beaches that at high tide are all separated. But at low tide you go out and you can literally. Walk for miles in either direction. And it's just incredible to go to that kind of size beach. It's completely flat, so when you walk out to swim, you can just keep walking. It gets deep enough and it's lovely. Of course, it's lovely warm water here in Cornwall as well. That's a lie. It's not warm at all, but it's lovely. In terms of stone circles. So there is this real feeling of ancientness around here that I think can be overlooked sometimes. It's worth going to see. On the North Coast, which actually isn't [00:29:00] that far from us. It's only about an hour's drive.
The beaches are spectacular, incredibly busy, but they are spectacular within. We have world class surfing beaches here as well. Not very far from us, we have somewhere amazing called the Monkey Sanctuary, which unfortunately, is closing. You used to be able to go and visit there, but you can't visit them this year, which I discovered recently, which is heartbreaking. But not very far from us, is a donkey sanctuary called Flicka, which has a wonderful vegan cafe. Yeah. Really nice. And they do a lovely summer fair at Flicka. There's a seal sanctuary down in Gweek. Yeah, so you can go and see seals, and it's a proper sanctuary as well, where they're rehabilitating injured seals. 
Oh.
You don't know what you're going to see. There might be lots of seals there or there might only be a couple, and they sometimes have, I think it's puffins, not penguins. Yeah. Super cute. Yes. They might be penguins, don't quote me on this, but [00:30:00] super, super cute down there. Not that far from us is Tintagel, which of course is steeped in history. King Arthur, round table. You get a real feeling when you go there; of something special going on there. I don't know if people believe in ley lines. I'm not even sure if I believe in ley lines, but there are some places where you go and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And Tintagel is definitely one of those places. Our favorite vegan cafe in the world is there. It's called, I never know if it's called Viega or Vega, but it's absolutely lovely. And the woman who owns it has pigs, so she and I chat quite often about the pigs. We're not very far from Plymouth. So although you are in Canada, there's lots of Americans who go to Plymouth because of course, that's where the Mayflower set off from. So there's the Mayflower steps and you can go and see where, if you're American, you can go and see where your ancestors set off from. And Plymouth is a really interesting city. It was bombed to smithereens during the [00:31:00] war, so quite a lot of it was rebuilt. They missed some really amazing parts. So there's Victorian and Georgian parts that have been restored and are just beautiful. There's lots of swimming in Plymouth. So you can be wandering around the shops one minute and then you can go for a dip the next, and coming from the city, for me, I just find that amazing.
But it feels so European to be in a city that has a beach and has lots of places where you can swim in the sea, and you can swim and look back, and there's like houses and proper buildings and things. So Plymouth is definitely worth a visit if you come down this way as well. 
That's a lot of great stuff right there.
And bizarrely, Newquay, it's not an international airport in itself, but you can fly from Newquay to Dublin, and then from Dublin you can fly to the States. So it's not that hard to get here from far-flung places. Yeah. And Bristol and Exeter aren't very far either. I think [00:32:00] Bristol's two hours and Exeter's an hour and  Newquay's only an hour. So we're bizarrely well connected.
That's incredible. And that gets me to my other question is, how people can get there. Is it well served by the train system or would people need to hire a car or use their own car to get to you? How far is it from London? These kinds of things would be helpful to know.
So there is a direct train from London to Plymouth, and then onto Liskeard, which is our closest town. It's small, but it's a town. We're about 15 minutes from the train station. However, we are in the middle of absolute nowhere. So you can come, you can get a taxi from the train station, come here, but you ain't going anywhere else while you are here. So ideally, people need a car. It's not too hard to drive here. The M5 is pretty good, and then it turns into a main road. And it's a straight shot from the M5. I don't think there's even a turning. I think there's one turning towards the end to go down the [00:33:00] lane. In terms of public transport, there isn't any in Cornwall. There are buses, but they're few and far between, and I don't think I'd be getting the bus. So ideally, people really need to have a car when they come here.
Yeah.
Or a motorbike. 
Sounds good. Alright. Or maybe a bicycle if someone's very fit. 
If you're training for the Tour de France, I would absolutely recommend coming and staying with us, and cycling from here every day. We are halfway down a valley, so whichever direction you go, you're going up or down a hill.
Love it. So Kate, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It's been a pleasure to getting to know you a little bit. And of course, the really amazing work you do. You must go to bed every evening absolutely white from working a regular job, and looking after all these animals, and cleaning the cottage, and all of these other incredible things that you do. I admire you so much for what it [00:34:00] is that you're doing.
Please tell us again, how is it that people can get in touch with you, book a stay and learn more about what it is that you are doing?
You can look at our website, which is www dot Haye Cornwall, and Haye is spelled H-A-Y-E; hayecornwall.co.uk. We're on Instagram and Facebook as, Haye Cornwall, H-A-Y-E Cornwall. Instagram and Facebook are great because you get to see the daily updates of the animals, and you can contact me through the website and our email address, and Instagram on Facebook.
Fabulous, and people can book also through just messaging you as well.
Yeah, message me direct. You can go through Airbnb, but it's obviously much better to come direct. We can sort you out if you want to come stay with us.
Amazing. When we were just recently in Dorset and Bristol, we really did put our next trip to the UK; was going to have to be exploring Cornwall a little bit more. For some [00:35:00] reason, Seb is really interested in Cornwall. So we are definitely going to be looking you up. Thank you so much again for taking the time to be on the podcast.
Thank you so much for having me. It's been great fun talking to you.
Thank you.