WHERE TO STAY AND EAT
No. 15 Great Pulteney
Ideally located for the Holburne Museum, this boutique hotel has 40 chic, individually designed townhouse guest rooms. There’s also a laid-back restaurant, tiny spa offering Ila and Natura Bissé treatments, and a smart cocktail bar. Just the place to relax after a day’s sightseeing.
No. 15 Great Pulteney, 15 Great Pulteney Street,
Bath BA2 4BR, 01225 807015; no15greatpulteney.co.uk
Number One Bruton
This Georgian townhouse opened its bright yellow door one year ago as a hotel to reveal 12 bedrooms within its main building and in a medieval forge at the rear. Natural fibres, handmade tiles and soft colour characterise the rooms while in the restaurant, Osip, next door, chef Merlin Labron Johnson presents inimitable feasts. Breakfast on ewe’s yoghurt, sweet rice pudding and brioche buns, while lunch and dinner might include teeny pickles with treacle and spelt bread, salt-baked celeriac with ricotta, macadamia and cavolo nero or smoked eel and egg yolk ravioli. The eggs mimosa is already legendary.
1 High St, Bruton BA10 0AB, 01749 813030; numberonebruton.com
Lord Poulett Arms
Just off the A303, the thatched, 16th-century Lord Poulett Arms has unpretentious but sumptuously comfortable rooms (Siberian goose down duvets, Egyptian cotton bedlinen, fragrant Bramley bathroom toiletries). In the lively bar, you can expect a decent pint and an inviting wine list with a food menu that always makes the most of regional produce, from tender well-aged steaks to heritage veg.
High St, Hinton Saint George TA17 8SE, 01460 73149; lordpoulettarms.com
At the Chapel
A restaurant-with-rooms which also comes with its own bakery, this is a welcoming place with sustainability at its heart. Small estate wines or local ciders will accompany your pizza from the wood-fired oven or any number of seasonally changing dishes using cheeses from nearby Westcombe Dairy, locally grown greens, and carefully sourced meat and fish. The eight bedrooms are sleek, minimal mixtures of white paint and dark wood, with mullioned windows.
28 High St, Bruton BA10 0AE, 01749 814070; atthechapel.co.uk
Dimpsey Glamping
In local dialect, dimpsey means gloaming, and there can be few better places to enjoy that special point in the day than from a romantic shepherd hut. Set on a small, historic farm in the Blackdown Hills, which is actually listed in the Domesday book, your hand-built Lilliputian billet comes with a shower room, double bed and kitchen. Everything is designed to help you unwind from the absence of wi-fi to the slow-boiling whistling kettle – oh, and a wood-fired hot tub outside from which to watch the sunset. Owner Emma Warren will guide you to the best pubs.
Beetham Ln, Chard TA20 3PY, 01460 477770; dimpsey.co.uk
Menu Gordon Jones
The one thing you won’t get at this small but perfectly formed Bath restaurant is a menu. Gordon Jones devises his intricate and flavour-packed dishes from whatever the market yields each day to devise a succession of uniquely seasonal tasting plates. Expect exquisite mouthfuls of savoury mousses, bonbons and sublime servings of fish and meat along with delicate pastries and puddings as ornate as an Ascot hat.
2 Wellsway, Bath BA2 3AQ, 01225 480871; menugordonjones.co.uk
spot, in a county known for apples and cider, to sample Julian Temperley’s Somerset Cider Brandy, distilled on the Levels.
At the gallery’s rear, spring breezes ripple through the moor grass and prairie dropseed in the Piet Oudolf field, a garden of movement as much as of colour, created by the famous plantsman. It’s a stunning addition to a town watched over by the ancient, roofless, hilltop tower, Bruton Dovecot.
What both Roth Bar & Grill and At the Chapel do is showcase the best of Somerset produce, for this is nothing if not an agricultural county. Dining pubs do this, too. At tiny Hinton St George, a village built from hamstone, the colour of honeycomb, menus at Lord Poulett Arms will typically offer steaks from a Crewkerne butcher, River Exe mussels and the tangiest, cheek-twanging local cheddars served as a rarebit.
Unsurprisingly, farm shops proliferate, from Whiterow at Beckington in the east to newly opened Teals at the A303 North/South Cadbury junction and if you stuff your luggage with edible souvenirs, John Leach’s thatch-roofed pottery, off the A303 at Muchelney, is the place to buy collectable things from which to eat them. Trained by his grandfather, Bernard, today Leach and his team throw robust and tactile tableware.
Pretty Langport, site of the eponymous Civil War battle in 1645, is close by, its location on the River Parrett making it a commercial centre in bygone days. Indeed, in the late1700s Stuckey’s Bank, housed in what is now Bank Chambers, had a banknote circulation second only to that of the Bank of England. Langport’s attractive octagonal town clock sits proudly above the arched entrance to the 18th-century town hall. Its wealth of history can be enjoyed any day of the week, but for homegrown vegetables, chutneys and jams, head for All Saints Hall on Thursdays.
The A303 bisects the southern half of Somerset, bordered by the tranquil isolation of the Blackdown Hills, another of the county’s designated AONBs. “Some say that the signposts removed during World War II were never put back,” says Emma Warren, who runs Dimpsey Glamping from the farm on which she lives with her husband, Andrew. While many, she says, regard the A303 as “a corridor to Cornwall”, travellers don’t need to venture far off it to immerse themselves in nature. “It’s really easy to get in contact with the countryside and the hills which rise up out of the Levels,” she says. “And there’s no shortage of good pubs to visit while you’re here.”
Continuing west, Somerset’s furthest reaches stretch northwest, beyond the M5, cupping the Bristol Channel and the town of Watchet, once a Saxon port and inspiration for Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Today the poet is celebrated by the Coleridge Way, a 51-mile walking route from Nether Stowey to Lynmouth in Devon crossing the Quantock Hills and taking in sights such as medieval Dunster Castle, loftily positioned on its steep tor.
When all your exertions are calling for tea and scones, the arcadian landscape of Hestercombe Gardens, at the southern tip of the Quantocks, is the answer. Created by Coplestone Warre Bampfylde in the 18th century, with later design by Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll, this special place was saved thanks to one of the first major garden restorations in the country. Baked indulgence from the Stables Café and a stroll on its Victorian terrace, filled with spring colour, will restore you in a fitting finale to this discovery of Somerset.