Hotel Staff Dig Deep For Epilepsy Centre

Staff members from Ashdown Park are helping to build a new pet enclosure at the National Centre for Young People with Epilepsy (NCYPE).

The group swapped their hotel uniforms for Wellington boots to get digging at the centre based at Lingfield on the border of East Sussex and Surrey. The centre, a registered charity, is the UK’s leading provider of education, assessment, rehabilitation, treatment and care for children and young people aged from five to 25 suffering from complex epilepsy and other neurological conditions.

Over the past few months a team of seven staff from the country house hotel at Wych Cross, near Forest Row, have been visiting the centre and joined other volunteers to construct the new small animal enclosure. When it is completed the pen will provide a large run for guinea pigs and rabbits inside a wheelchair accessible enclosure.

Rebecca Stevens, Owen Emmerson, Ben Davidson, Laura Eldridge, Maria Illiopoulos, Ben Richards and Richard Manktelow are all members of the hotel’s ‘making a difference team’, which was set up last year to lend a hand with various community projects. The team’s first project was a woodland clearance programme in Ashdown Forest.

Rebecca, a sales co-ordinator at Ashdown Park, said: “We have really enjoyed being involved with the NCYPE project. The next stage is to finish spreading the top soil before laying the turf and there is a small amount of fencing still to be completed.”