MOVING TO...Somerset
Hankering after a life in the countryside? Don’t leave home without our expert guide for house-hunters
It was the search for a garden that brought us to the village of Leigh upon Mendip. Living in a tiny cottage in Bath with two young boys, we longed for somewhere bigger than our small terrace and flat enough to kick a football around (no small ask in a city of seven hills). For two years, we searched in the Swainswick Valley, a magical dell just north of the city, but looking for a property in this bucolic setting, within cycling distance of a mainline station and a Bath bun’s throw of the M4, was like seeking champagne on a scrumper’s budget. Widening the search to a more affordable corner of the county, we found a fairytale doer-upper in what’s dubbed Somerset’s Golden Triangle, the area between Wells, Frome and Castle Cary.
The garden was so overgrown that a cloud of clematis was reaching into the roof tiles, but footworn flagstones peeked through threadbare carpets and sunlight shimmered through cobwebbed Georgian windowpanes. Taking a gargantuan leap up the property ladder, we swapped our two-up, two-down in Bath for a 500-year-old farmhouse with three acres of land.
The house may have brought us here, but Somerset’s offbeat charm is what has made it feel like home. A change in the direction of my writing, away from stories about places reachable by plane to local ones, was hastened by the pandemic, when our walks were curtailed to neighbouring Cranmore Woods, with its Hansel and Gretel cottage and tower, and Beacon Hill, with its Bronze Age barrows, wishing tree and views of Glastonbury Tor.
Rarely did we meet anyone else. The same was true last February when we spent half-term walking the East Mendip Way from Wells to Frome. It leads almost directly past our back door yet showed us the local hills and woodlands anew. We knew that our house lies on a road once used by the Romans to transport lead from mines in the Mendips to their docks at Clausentum (now part of Southampton), but our connection to this ancient landscape – and our house’s place within it – is now more tangible.
Wanting to share this overlooked pocket of Somerset with others prompted us to open The Scrumpling (thescrumpling.co.uk), a vintage caravan hideaway in our woods that takes its name from an old word for a small, wonky apple. We’ve hosted walkers, wild swimmers, food-lovers and Soho House members wanting to hang out at neighbouring Babington House, part of the same members’ club network, but stay somewhere cheaper.
That we get so many foodies is testament to the region’s
