Finding the Pleasures of an English Farm Holiday

Just outside any metropolitan area, you can see the cows and sheep grazing on checkered hillsides, the rough stone walls neatly paralleling country roads, the orchards and haystacks and the weathered barns.

Stop to take a picture of a pig or pick an apple off a tree and you may notice the folks responsible for such bucolic beauty--craggy-faced, ruddy-cheeked, fair-haired farmers.

There are plenty of them. But if you’re an untutored tourist, you won’t get a chance to share common ground, unless you spend a night in their farmhouses.

In Great Britain, visiting a farm is as easy as milking a cow, perhaps easier. Thousands of farmers have opened doors, hearths and hearts to travelers seeking shelter from the helter-skelter of urban strife and run-of-the-mill travel recommendations.

While most farmhouse accommodations are rustic and unpretentious, many offer luxurious rooms with separate baths, majestic meals, swimming pools, tennis courts and privileges at nearby golf courses. English farmhouses tend to be big, rambling affairs. Rates generally run from $12 to $24 U.S. per person, breakfast included.

Up at Dawn

Farmers (and their sons) are usually up at dawn and at work by 8 a.m., so the wife has time to serve guests between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., to clean house, to change the sheets and to still do daily chores.

On a recent holiday through the English countryside, my wife, Margaret, and I stayed at two very different farms.

Driving through Cumbria and the picturesque Lake District, we decided to spend a night in the area Wordsworth called “the most exquisite place in England.”

An oasis of pastoral calm, the Cumbrian countryside is a patchwork of hill farms dotted with blue-green, stone cottages and black-and-white cows.

From our trusty “Stay on a Farm” booklet, a guide to more than 400 farms that is published free by the British Tourist Authority, we selected a medium-sized (270 acres) sheep farm near Kendal.

Margaret was particularly keen on this farm because each of the four guests rooms had private baths.

However, when we called late in the day, all the rooms were booked. The farmer’s wife suggested a friend a few miles away. (Farmer’s wives frequently recommend nearby farms if theirs are booked or busy; they can also help plan tours through the countryside and book ahead to farms in other districts.)

Animal Farm

We called and found a room at the Patton Hall Farm about 10 miles from Kendal. Harold and Margaret Hodgson have about 200 acres on which they keep 150 cows, a dozen geese, a few chickens, goats and sheep and two dogs--a boxer that barked at anything that moved and a spotted mutt with floppy ears that wanted to be everyone’s best friend.

There were two ancient barns, one huge up-to-date milking shed and a farmhouse more than 250 years old.

The Hodgsons have grown children (some who live in the main house and some who come by each morning) who work on the farm. Harold Hodgson’s grandmother was born in the living room.

There are only two guest rooms at Patton Hall. To Margaret’s dismay, neither had a private bath. So we shared a bathroom with a couple from London spending a week at the farm while touring the Lake District.

Our room had a sink, tea-making equipment and wonderful antique furniture. The price was $30 U.S. for the two of us, including breakfast.

A Country Breakfast

There is nothing like an English farm breakfast. It was a typical banquet of fresh juice, grapefruit slices, tea, cold cereal, white toast or granary bread (a fresh, brown bread made with whole seeds), a couple of eggs, with ham, bacon or sausage, plus fried tomatoes, black pudding and bowls of homemade marmalade.

We sat at a table overlooking a valley, listening to the clamor of the kitchen, watching a bumblebee dive into the marmalade, stuffing our bellies.

Margaret Hodgson serves huge, reasonably priced, homemade dinners, as do most farmers’ wives, but you have to order them in the morning.

After dinner, we strolled around the farm, petted the calves (“We’ve got 20 this year,” Margaret Hodgson said. “It was a good year”) and marveled at how many stars you can see when the nearest city lights are 10 miles away.

We were awakened long before breakfast by the crowing of the cocks and the mooing of the cows outside our window.

After another overwhelming breakfast, we again walked, played hide-and-seek with the barking boxer, reacquainted ourselves with the livestock and admired the talents of the mutt as he herded cows and geese around the farm.

We said our farewells to the family, packed the car, cleaned our shoes and began a tour of Cumbria.

A Corner of Somerset

Our stay at the Quiet Corner Farm in the county of Somerset provided quite a contrast.

Brian and Patricia Thompson have lived in the village of Henstridge since 1970, but they always had their eye on the old farmhouse down the road.

Built in 1759, originally as a gardener’s cottage, it functioned for years as Quiet Corner Farm, but increasingly fell into disrepair.

In 1984, the Thompsons bought the old house and outbuildings on five acres. “It was a shambles,” Patricia Thompson said.

With their grown daughter and three sons, they turned the place around. The boys dug a well and her husband built a stone wall around it.

In addition to the two cottages, which rent by the week, there are two nice rooms with double beds (about $18 U.S. per person, including breakfast). Both rooms are modern and comfortable, with wash basins and antique furnishings; one has its own bath facilities, the other has a complete bathroom outside its door.

Lambs to Market

Because of its proximity (within walking distance) to Henstridge and its excellent pubs, Quiet Corner seemed like more of a private home than a working farm.

Off the garden and behind the paddocks was a small flock of sheep. Every spring Patricia Thompson takes the lambs to the market in Sturminster Newton in the neighboring county of Dorset.

And making up most of the five acres of Quiet Corner is an old apple orchard that produces six to seven tons of apples in a good year.

The family harvests the crop, keeping a few bushels for themselves; Patricia serves apple compote along with her full English breakfast.

But the bulk of the apples are sold to David Aldrich and his wife, Rosemary, who run a cider mill six miles up the road near the town of Wincanton.

By coincidence, the Thompsons’ apples were being pressed during our stay at Quiet Corner, so we drove to Rosies Cider to watch.

Aldrich, his wife and children live in a longhouse, a thatched cottage that dates back to the 15th Century. They live at one end and, from a shop at the other end, sell three kinds of cider (dry, medium and sweet) to more than 7,000 customers a year.

Gallons of Cider

It takes a ton of apples to produce 100 gallons of cider, so the six tons every year from the Thompsons are just a drop in the bucket for Aldrich, who gets his apples from a dozen local farmers.

Behind the longhouse, he and his apprentice squeeze the apples on presses built in the mid-1800s, and store the cider in large, stainless steel vats.

The Thompson’s apples, coming from an ancient orchard, are not of the finest quality, so Rosies usually employs them in a local brew known as Scrumpy.

“But it’s an excellent Scrumpy,” Aldrich said, handing us another mug of cider. It tasted like regular apple juice, but packed a wallop. English cider has an alcoholic content somewhere between beer and wine and costs less than 70 cents U.S. a pint.

After a tour of his home and presses, we staggered over to the shop to bring a jug of sweet cider back to Quiet Corner.

The farm is at the intersection of three great touring counties--Somerset, Dorset and Wilshire, and is roughly an hour’s drive from Bath, Salisbury and Stonehenge.

The West Country (which also includes the counties of Cornwall, Devon and Avon) is an area of England so popular with visitors that the British Tourist Authority publishes a free booklet listing bed and breakfast accommodations.

The farm vacation, however, remains a relatively unknown option for most Americans.

The booklets “Stay on a Farm” and “Bed and Breakfast in the West Country” are available free from the British Tourist Authority, 350 S. Figueroa St., Suite 450, Los Angeles 90071, (213) 628-3525.

Free booklets also are available from Scottish Farmhouse Holidays, 4 Drumtenant, Ladybank, Fife, Scotland, and Country Farm Holidays, 60 Shaw Mews, Shaw Street, Worcester, England WR1-300.