Broughton Sanctuary is betting on transformation as the next frontier in travel – rewilding not just the land, but its guests’ inner worlds, too. And it needn’t come through tears and anguish: its new "Immersion" retreat is a gateway for the transformation-curious. Words and photography by Robbie Hodges

I’m inhaling wet turf when it first happens; my bum in the air like a bobtail, camera poised on an ancient oak. Archetypal digital native that I am, my snapper is an analogue piece of kit some 50 years old. It had been clicking along just fine days before – recently serviced, tip-top. Now, it’s jammed. 

Fast forward several hours. I’m huddled in the bedroom loo of another guest – me and three strangers, lovely people – combing the wallpaper. A collage of artefacts plucked from the family archives stickers the walls. Here, a photo of ancestors gallumphing about the estate, there a letter from dusty aristocrats past. I reach for my phone camera and, no matter how hard I jab the glitching screen, it simply will not comply.

I’m not averse to the woo-woo; I’m a travel writer who lives in East London, for lord’s sake. But you see, I’d swept into the forecourt of Broughton Sanctuary – a Palladianised pile of Downton Abbey proportions – only eight hours before, and something spiritual was already stirring within me. Pre-Broughton me would have pounded the internet for step-by-step Wiki-help. Instead, I was coming to see the glitches as some kind of divine intervention, what Broughton’s acolytes might call “a synchronicity”.

Before rolling your eyes, check your vibrational frequency, please. To not feel profoundly moved while routling about this museum-grade family home is impossible. Though the hall’s facade has all the neoclassical pomp of a hit Netflix franchise, the estate’s foundations stretch back 1,000 years. Inside, the eyeline is besieged by Old Money at every angle: Underfoot, a palatial rug supposedly gifted by Marie Antoinette; on the walls, a family photo with Mother Teresa jauntily leans against a personal monogram from Queen Elizabeth II.

Yes, it’s irrefutably posh posh. But don’t go lumping it in with Britain’s cucumber-sandwich-serving grande dame hotels. It’s not that, nor is it a straight-up Retreat Centre of the Nine Perfect Strangers ilk. In Broughton’s own words, it’s a “House of Transformation” and I’ve chugged up to its ancestral grounds in Yorkshire, to Skipton specifically, to undergo an alchemical transformation of my own.

The Transformation Economy   

I’m here for the first ever Broughton Immersion, a kind of gateway product for the transformation-curious. It wasn’t without trepidation that I accepted the invitation: Some of Broughton’s more introspective retreats, I’m told, have guests pounding pillows with rage and sobbing in the foetal position. The more extrospective (“Human Flourishing & AI” to “Rehumanising Democracy”) meanwhile, push at the limits of wellbeing, promising to lift guests out of ideological fugues by offering a fresh outlook on the 21st centuries’ most pressing anxieties. 

Does Roger Tempest, the 32nd Tempest to inherit this grand pile, consider Broughton an agent of transformation? “Yeah,” he says earnestly. “I know we’re an old place and that sort of thing,” he continues, gesturing through a screen of branches at Broughton’s towering cupola, “but we’re all about the future. It’s basically, what’s breaking down? And what’s breaking through?”

“Transformation” sounds lofty, perhaps. But Broughton may have landed on something. Google searches for “transformative travel” have surged 900 per cent in five years, while 84 per cent of people surveyed by VML say they plan to focus on personal growth in the year ahead. Joseph Pine – the man who foresaw The Experience Economy back in 1999 – has a name for the travellers chasing transformations: not visitors, but “aspirants”, each travelling with their own “From X to Y” ambition. Broughton, it seems, is already building for them.

A Celestial Immersion 

“A lot of people are living half-lived lives,” says Roger at the retreat’s opening circle, his legs folded like a pretzel, the sleek angles of Broughton’s high-spec wellness centre lending an ecclesiastical echo. He’s gazing into a flickering candle. It sits on sprays of greenery gathered from the landscape that quivers beyond the panoramic windows, their tendrils reaching towards the 30-odd retreaters gathered around. “At Broughton we’re interested in developing inner and outer nature,” he continues, “it’s about connecting with parts of yourself that might have been shut off.” 

After a short meditation, a trail of lights lead us to The Gate of Transformation in the nearby woods, now thick with dusk. It’s a weathered arch, a threshold which we pass through silently, clutching an idea of where we’d like to be once our time at Broughton is up. For the first but not the last time, my mind feels soupy with potential. 

Maybe it’s the cacao. We’re cradling cups of it around an open fire when Maxmillien, a waifish astrologer from Berlin, casually drops some celestial intel: we’ve landed slap-bang between a solar and lunar eclipse. Seven days since one; seven until the other. According to ancient lore, he says with a face smoked out by fiery tremulations, during eclipse seasons emotions unravel in wild and unexpected ways, leading to perspicacious breakthroughs. 

I think back. Exactly one week before, I was a sweat sandwich on Primrose Hill in North London – squelching uncomfortably among the melee of eclipse hunters, many one eye deep in a Cheerio’s box or ogling a kitchen colander with awe. It felt apocalyptic then – the weirdness, yes, but also the scorched earth and the angsty tussle of bodies. A bombastic mother in front of me shoved an older woman to the floor with one arm, iPhone outstretched in the other. 

Our fragmented, digital world makes it so tempting to believe we’re living through end times – more tempting, still, to numb ourselves with digital anaesthetic. But here, at Broughton, with each activity in our 8-to-10 itinerary I start slipping off the (literal and metaphorical) noise-cancelling headphones and plugging back into the IRL. Self-consciously at first, then not, I begin to fingle branches as I pass, let birdsong patter on my eardrums and pull in images with eyes that are thirsty like magnets.

This attentiveness only deepens at dawn the next morning on a group micro-pilgrimage led by Brandt Miller of Mongolian pilgrimage outfit Steppe and Soul. With him as our shepherd, we pass the beaver enclosure’s demi-gnawed tree trunks, into fields so vital that silken tresses of grass tickle my elbows, and over lumpen hillocks that betray an ancient druid burial ground. At one point, a hush descends as a pair of snowy barn owls swoop overhead.

Up on Ancestor Hill – a godly perch studded with memorial stones of Tempests past – Roger points out where Broughton’s rich, tussocky fields end and the neighbour’s screensaver-green carpet begins. From here, it’s fair to say, the grass is always greener – thwack-in-the-face Brat Summer green – even if its biodiversity score is deep in the red.

Broughton’s 2,500 acres haven’t always looked this unruly. Since 2021, the estate has been steadily relinquishing its grip on the landscape, allowing nature back in where intensive farming had pushed it out. The tally so far: 1,750 animal species and 350,000 new trees.

But rewilding, Broughton’s crook-swinging ecologist River Six (the perfect aptronym – look it up) tells me, isn’t really about doing very much at all. “We’re not just going in and planting loads of trees,” he says. “We’re observing what the land wants and nudging it in that direction.”

Rewilding the mind 

“Nudge.” It’s the modus operandi for Broughton. Two days earlier, my brain would surely have constructed a phantom illness to protect me from the two-hour singing workshop. Now, I can say I’ve spent two hours whooping and clapping with strangers in a field like an evangelical tripping hard on psilocybin. It was euphoric. You simply must try it. 

This is, after all, what “rewilding the mind” is all about; nudging your brain out of its modern maladaptations and hang-ups, back to something less inhibited. And I know Broughton are masters of it because, for a third of my fellow retreaters, this isn’t their first rodeo. 

Thrice I’m told by misty-eyed returnees that I should give over my savings, become a sperm donor or ransom my neighbour’s rare sphynx cat, anything to undertake the £3,000 Path of Love retreat – a mysterious, week-long format with a 1:1 guest to staff ratio that chomps through your darkest fears and spits you out a new person. Or rather, an older (i.e. earlier) version of yourself. 

One such advocate is Amelie, a retired IT consultant. She’s being buzzed by microelectric currents when we first meet – cuffed by the wires of a pocket-sized device called a Diamond Shield Crystal Zapper. Whatever it’s doing, must be working. She’s aglow, peaceful in a way that can only be described as Paltrow-esque. After packing up her life in the Netherlands six years ago, now she scores Europe in a souped-up van, zipping from one retreat to another on an ever-deepening quest of inner discovery. 

And there’s Simon, once a troubled youth, now lightfooted and silver-haired with an irrepressible smile. He upped sticks to India at 31 and had an out-of-body epiphany so inexplicable that he’s never looked back; a blinding vision of the Hindu god Shiva swirling towards him with a potency that toppled him from his chair. In recent years, he manifested that he’d be sucked into Broughton’s gravitational pull: Two months ago he landed a gig as the estate’s caretaker. Cosmic, you might say. 

“Oh, I’ve done all kinds of woo-woo stuff,” says Wendy from Sydney, as we slurp bowls of cauliflower and turmeric soup at lunch one day. The woo-woo-iest of all? “Muscle tapping,” she says at first, and then, “no, past life projection!” For the uninitiated, PLP is a method of hypnosis that claims to uncover memories and experiences from previous incarnations. “She [the practitioner] asked where I was from and I just blurted out ‘Mesopotamia!’ I didn’t even know where that was. I just said it!”

A gateway for the transformation-curious 

For Amelie, Simon, Wendy and the rest, Broughton’s Immersion Retreat is entry-level stuff, which makes it ideal for those erring on the mainstream edge of alternative wellness practices. 

Peppered throughout the itinerary are more esoteric leaps – a tarot reading taken in a stone labyrinth, the aforementioned singing workshop guided by Leeds-based improv group Wildsong Collective, and various plunges into deep personal conversations orchestrated by Broughton’s facilitators. But for each one, there’s a more mainstream complement. 

One day I find myself lake swimming in the pouring rain and toddling up grassy banks into a forest where a wood-fired sauna cooks, sequestered among leafy boughs; me and my retreaters yelping with all the primal glee of a coyote pack. Another, I’m prostrate on a mattress of pillows as the most celestial sound bath washes over me. The “Silent Disco Journey” in the woods – top billing for many (I missed it, foolishly) – was an Ecstatic Dance set to a crescendo of ambient beats delivered via illuminated headphones in milky morning light.  

By letting the transformation-curious go as straight and narrow or as whackadoodle as they like, Broughton’s pick’n’mix approach offers an unusually accessible way to try transformative travel on for size.

“A regular retreat tells you that if only you heal your childhood and cry about your past, you will finally be happy,” says Sevanti, Broughton’s retreat facilitator, with a wry smile. “What we need the most is to get into contact with different aspects of ourselves; the part that is an artist, that is creative, that moves, that connects to people. So [the premise of the retreat is] not so much that there is something wrong with you based on your past, but that you haven’t accessed the different dimensions of what it means to be a human being”.

Before I’m bundled into the Broughton-branded truck and sent back to my smoggy, concrete den in East London, I take a moment in the on-site chapel, a true Catholic chocolate box that gleams with handpainted 1930s splendour. Placed just so on rickety benches are the timeless reassurances of Christianity – hand-stitched liturgical linens, sacred vessels, vestments, dog-eared hymn books and those painfully chic, skinny little candles. 

Standing among these liturgical paraphernalia, all the weekend’s trendy New Age activities suddenly feel like legacies of something much more fundamental. Beneath the countless pairs of Vivobarefoot shoes and wellness speak are practices humans have used to find meaning and one another for millennia. As the weekend’s alt spiritual practices gain ground, across the UK, cathedrals are erecting climbing gyms in their spires or hosting DJs as Christianity grasps at relevance. (St. Paul’s has just signed a deal with veteran nightclub, Fabric – yes, really.) 

It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for Roger to pose something as radical as plugging the gap that organised religion has left behind. A family doesn’t cling onto their estate for 1,000 years without much hardship and continuous, radical reinvention. On a group dive into the family archives, old sheets of vellum detail such tribulations; decades of dereliction, persecution, people hung, drawn and quartered right here, during the Tudor requisition. In the battle for survival, every generation of Tempests appears to have whipped up a storm, Roger being the latest.

Back to not-so normal 

A week later, my feet might be back on London asphalt but I seem to have left my head in a crystal singing bowl. People are looking at me differently. Or maybe I’m just looking at them, not my phone. Tight-lipped friends who would never deign to slip me a compliment say I’m “glowing”. And I’ll admit, I do at least feel like one of those cartoonishly salubrious men you see in health supplement ads. 

“I’m well,” I tell the floppy-haired barista when he launches into the obligatory small talk one morning. “I mean, considering it’s eclipse season, you know?” His initial response – laughter – settles into the unnerved smile of a person trying to wet the fuse of a loose canon before it explodes in his face. Poor guy. We’ve all been in his shoes. As I garble on about emergent new paradigms, he surreptitiously slides a coffee towards me in slow motion: “Anyway, have a good day, man.”

Maybe this is it, I think. Maybe I’ve fallen into the woo-woo rabbit hole. Either that or what I’ve returned to is stranger than I realised. I feel present and connected and more trustful of others. I’m thinking of my friends more. I’m listening to fewer podcasts and watching less TV. I’ve also developed a distasteful habit of misquoting an Instagram reel posted by the yogi influencer Sadhguru to whoever happens to fall in my orbit. 

Friends, baffled by the change, routinely ask “when will it end?” (My spiritual journey, that is.) Not in a desperate plea to the heavens, I tell myself, at least. Rather, they’re trying to understand how a state of blissful enlightenment nurtured in the folds of Yorkshire can survive among “all this” – at which point they might gesture at my Brutalist apartment block, the white noise machine on my bedside table or the Real Housewives streaming history on my Hulu account.

I’ve been reframing the question to myself. The old trivial concerns about work and relationships are still there. I’m just handling them better. A more pressing anxiety has taken over: how to cling onto this ethereal sensibility. In other words, how do I consolidate the powerful feeling of potential fostered at Broughton into a true lifestyle “transformation”? 

I go for walks. I head to my local sauna. I take a deep breath. And then I open my laptop, type “The Path of Love” into Google and hit search.

The next Broughton Immersion will be Friday 18th June to Monday 21st June 2027. Lead in price is £550 (for a single occupancy room with a shared bathroom in a retreat house).