How a South African billionaire is turning a corner of Somerset into ‘one man’s estate’ — SkimNews
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Koos Bekker, South African billionaire and Naspers chair with a £3bn net worth, has acquired more than 2,700 acres around Bruton and Castle Cary through Emily Estate (UK) Limited, which trades as the Newt, snapping up land, farmhouses, and high street businesses.
- Castle Cary station has been renamed "Castle Cary for the Newt," with food writer Hugh Thomas calling the move "arrogant and brazen" and saying the station feels "colonised."
- Flash flooding in May 2023 reached levels "beyond levels seen in living memory," prompting the local council to declare an emergency — residents blame the estate's road building and hard-core surfacing for worsening run-off.
- Locals have petitioned against pesticide spraying on the estate's farmland, and farmers suspect new boreholes drilled by the hotel have dried up sections of the River Brue that runs through neighbour Oliver Dowding's cider orchards.
- Derek Gow, a rewilding expert consulted about the Newt's caged red squirrels, called the five-animal enclosure "performative," warning they would catch squirrelpox and die if released.
- The Newt employs 650+ people locally but restricts access to its gardens — featuring a historically accurate Roman villa and treetop walkway — to hotel guests or holders of an £85 annual pass.
Why it matters: A single billionaire now controls more than 2,700 acres of Somerset countryside plus enough local businesses that a public train station bears his hotel's name — and that concentration has already produced a council-declared flooding emergency, a pesticide petition, and river-bed concerns, showing how private estate expansion can reshape whole communities faster than local governance can respond.
Ask SkimNews
