In April 2008 TIDNOR WOOD ORCHARDS CIC (Community Interest

Company) was incorporated at Companies House, Cardiff, and TIDNOR WOOD ORCHARD TRUST is now part of this fledgling limited company. A CIC is a newish legal entity that was designed to fill the void between a full trading company and a registered charity. TIDNOR WOOD ORCHARDS CIC can trade and make profits

(although there are restrictions on their distribution), but most importantly, the company's assets have a lock applied to them - they cannot be easily disposed of other than to a registered CIC or to another charity. In this way, we hope to be able to secure our orchard land and other assets safe for future generations.

Our MUSEUM ORCHARD (Five plus acres – two hectares) was a commercial orchard of half standard trees, and we have maintained this format when replacing existing tress with our museum varieties over the last six years.  This is a working museum of proper sized trees that will contribute to their upkeep soon enough, as we send a huge variety of apples of all manner of shapes and sizes and colours off to the cider maker’s mill. OLD ORCHARD is 2+ acres of 1930s standard trees, many bearded with mistletoe and decidedly arthritic in demeanour. We have planted the gaps with youngsters that will help ensure the orchard lives on and on. FRENCH ORCHARD is 4+ acres, whilst BOTTOM ORCHARD (13 acres) is the engine of our cider apple production, whilst having its gaps filled with duplicates of our rare Museum trees.

Bottom Orchard

We are as busy as our bees, which produce lots of tasty TIDNOR WOOD honey.

10 acres (4 hectares) of virgin land has been acquired in Calvados, Normandie, in a beautiful spot just outside the market town of Vire. The first two dozen trees were planted there  February 2008, and we have more than a hundred French trees with our nurseryman en route to be planted both in France and at Tidnor. Our French Collection is up and running. Our aim is to be sustainable and not to rely on subsidies and handouts from bureaucratic government and European institutions. In that way we might avoid the restrictions and conditions that such handouts usually seem to attract and allow ourselves more autonomy. But we do need to sell our fruit and our services and ourselves. Happily, we have a contract to sell our cider apples to Messrs. Westons until 2017 inclusive.

We commend our tree sponsorship scheme to you. For just a single payment of £75 (2009 price) we invite you to sponsor a tree of a unique variety in our Museum Orchard FOR THE LIFE OF THAT TREE – maybe fifty years or more. What is more, we will throw in a Life Membership

of the TIDNOR WOOD ORCHARD TRUST and a promise of no begging letters and subscription demands.

You might consider making a gift of a tree sponsorship to a friend or loved one; A TREE FOR LIFE. We will do everything we reasonably can to personalise that gift for you. You would be making a very positive step to put something back into the environment, and that is exactly what the TIDNOR WOOD ORCHARD TRUST is all about.

One of our ambitions is to develop TIDNOR WOOD ORCHARDS CIC into TIDNOR WOOD ORCHARDS CIC PLC and convert our member’s sponsorship certificates into share certificates.

We intend to contain visitors’ access to the orchards to specific Open Days or otherwise by arrangement. We can then be relatively sure that all the rabbits and hares, the foxes and badgers, the voles and field mice, the deer, the woodpeckers and wrens, and all the animals and insects that enjoy the tooth and claw business of basic survival, can get on with it relatively undisturbed.

But when our visitors do arrive, and I hope that they will do so from all corners of the globe, they will not be disappointed. TIDNOR WOOD ORCHARDS are in a beautiful location, hard by Hereford City, yet serenely undisturbed, remote by English standards, with southerly aspects over the beautiful and fertile valley of the River

Variety Yarlington Mill