My National Trust ‘sconeathon’ for my late husband
Devoted wife tries teatime treat at all 244 properties – and finds out the secret to the perfect recipe
FROM pronunciation to the order of cream and jam, the scone might be Britain’s most divisive sweet treat.
But it has proven far less contentious for the woman who has eaten one at every possible National Trust property – and revealed her favourite.
Sarah Merker, 49, from London, has spent the last decade testing scones at all 244 National Trust grand houses and gardens that sell them, spanning England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The marketing director has now completed the task, eating her last scone at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland on Wednesday in memory of her late husband Peter, who died from cancer in 2018 and had joined her for half of the challenge.
Ms Merker began her scone tour in 2013 after buying an £84 annual membership for the charity.
Since her first outing at Chartwell in Kent, she has tried a host of flavours such as white chocolate and raspberry; chocolate and espresso; and apple and cinnamon scones.
Ms Merker has reviewed the scones on an online blog, nationaltrustscones.com, attracted a 7,000-strong following on Twitter and even had a book published – The National Trust Book of Scones – which contains 50 recipes from the National Trust’s very own chefs.
“It’s all very emotional,” Ms Merker said. “It’s just played a very important part of my life.”
Recalling how Peter inspired her to complete the challenge, she said: “He’d been there for so much of it and obviously I have memories of doing it with him. So, for me, it was really important to finish it for him as well. I finished at the Giant’s Causeway because my husband and I had been there before we even started this project, so I knew he’d seen it and I wanted to go somewhere where he had already been. But also I needed to make sure there was a scone – can you imagine the anti-climax of turning up and there not being one?”
The challenge included racking up a bill of at least £900 on scones, the Covid pandemic halting travel and eating 26 scones throughout a particularly busy August in 2019.
Her favourite was a Christmas pudding scone with brandy butter at Treasurer’s House in York, while at Dunwich Heath in Suffolk she stumbled across a “sconeathon” of 20 varieties and managed to eat five, including a sticky toffee pudding scone, a chocolate orange variety and even a Malteser themed one.
Ms Merker has also learned a thing or two about how to make them perfect.
“The best scones have to be fresh, it’s 100 per cent got to be baked on the day,” she explained. “Every hour counts.”
She has given almost 100 of the samples a rating of five stars and only encountered two stale ones, though she would not say which.
But what of the perennial questions of pronunciation and the order of toppings? “I pronounce it as ‘scon’ because my dad is Scottish,” she said.
After hesitation, she also divulged her preferred order of toppings: “I’m definitely a jam-first girl. In Devon, where they are cream first, it’s because the cream is thicker like butter, Cornish cream
is not like that.”