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Avalon Awakening

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Avalon Awakening T R AV EL AVALON AWAKENING Confined to these shores, the travel writer The guinea fowl are my morning Catherine Fairweather reflects on the delights of Somerset, the wake-up call, rattling and tapping county closest to her heart, with its mysterious mediaeval bossily at the window, claiming attention and grain. They’ll spend towers, far-reaching vistas and Arthurian legends the day patrolling the lanes and out- lying fields of my Somerset village like comedy-sketch policemen, stand- ing sentinel at dusk on the highest leafy branches, ready to raise the above: the somerset alarm. Their favourite roost is the old countryside. right: the oak, which, like all the trees in this pantheon at stourhead. ancient county that stretches from below: the river brue Minehead on the west coast to Frome in the south-east, has been allowed to grow crooked, twisted and gnarled. It frames a pasto- ral patchwork of small fields – threaded through with gleaming brooks, edged with hawthorn hedges – that tucks itself around the lap of an intimate and quiet landscape beneath Creech Hill and Cadbury Castle. Gentle and understated, this green and pleas- ant England, rinsed by Bristol Channel mists I have admired the collaborative chatter of rooks and rain, has none of the theatre of the distant in the crafting of their elaborate rookeries, exotic lands to which I have spent my career as smiled at the cartoonish playfulness of a hare a travel writer escaping over the past two decades. These chase around the oak in mating season, and understood, hills are merely mole-mounds compared with the dreaming through trial and error, that wild garlic needs to be picked pinnacles of the snow-capped Himalayas, the temperate before it flowers to make a less bitter soup. climate unchallenging when set against the electrifying sun The physical and geographical scope of my newly discov- and wind-blasted elemental beauty of my Mediterranean ered, redefined world is set out by the ancient and mysterious summer home. It seems domestic and tame beside the towers that stalk the horizon and stake out my boundaries: desert or jungly wilds of Africa, India and Indochina Glastonbury Tor to the west, Bruton Dovecote straight beyond. Somerset cannot even claim the drama and the ahead. To my rear, Cranmore Tower, rising some 900 feet, accompanying drum roll of England’s poeticised Lakeland is the highest point in the Mendips – an architectural gim- region and fells. But the fact of being by necessity grounded mick that is appealing in its very uselessness, like the other here, unable to move much beyond the boundaries of my quintessential English folly at my shoulder, the 18th-century view, has opened my inherently nomadic soul to a whole King Alfred’s Tower, which stands on the furthest boundary English universe of small, previously unnoticed countryside of Somerset, believed to commemorate an important Saxon things. I have learnt that the hoot of the owl is louder in victory against the Vikings. I love to go blackberry-picking winter when naked trees don’t in the shadows of this building, which serves no purpose muffle the sound, that lady- other than to enhance the beauty of the Stourhead estate. birds are drawn to pale colours hauser & wirth at But Stourhead proper is in Wiltshire, just across the border. and that the drill of the wood- durslade farm. left: Historically, there were few feudal landlords in Somerset the queen at the PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY, HARRY CORY WRIGHT, I-IMAGES/POOL pecker is a harbinger of spring. gallery last year and no tradition of big 18th-century landed estates. Since the time of the Monmouth rebellion in 1685, when the Royalists defeated the raggle-taggle ‘Pitchfork’ Army that threatened to topple the status quo, the aristocracy have stayed firmly out of the county. No member of the Royal family paid a visit for 500 years; in fact, Queen Victoria report edly pulled down the blinds when her train passed Taunton. Unbeliev- glastonbury tor ably, it has only been in this decade that the county has in somerset been honoured with a visit: first in 2014, when Prince Town & Country * 145 T R AV EL SET THE SCENE… glastonbury tor. far Ancient sites, exquisite artworks and left, from top: the river brue. bruton town gastronomical delights await Arthur that drew Steinbeck here and obsessed him. From the ramparts of the steep-ditched and oak- THE NEWT solid stronghold of The South African owners of the acclaimed Babylonstoren Cadbury Castle, the hotel have channelled the same energy, vision and funds into imagined Camelot of creating a multifaceted estate with a vegetable plot, cider the enlightened king- orchards, woodland and ‘garden-rooms’ themed around colours and fragrances. The treetop Viper dom, you can see all NUMBER ONE BRUTON left: osip. bottom, walkway gives you a woodpecker’s view over the the way to Glastonbury Tor – the defin- Inhabited since the 16th century and once Steinbeck’s from left: the grounds and you can take courses on beekeeping ing icon of the Somerset landscape, a favourite hardware shop, this building has been cottage garden and honey. Book the stable-rooms, named after at the newt. symbol of the Arthurian age of chivalry beautifully converted into a 12-room hotel with a King Arthur’s horses, Hengroen and Llamrei. hauser & wirth and its idealised past. As the legendary Michelin-starred chef overseeing its restaurant, Osip. It is www.thenewtinsomerset.com Charles commiserated, in Isle of Avalon, it seems to float above the also a collaborative decorative project filled with artworks person, with victims of the flatlands of the Levels, above the mist, a healing place donated by locals: photos flooding on the Levels, and whose energies were said to have restored the King after and prints by Don McCullin, then last year, when the Queen battle. It is also the major intersection of the Earth’s sculptures by Candace visited the Hauser & Wirth magnetic channels of energy, ley lines, which have turned Bahouth, riotous armchairs gallery at Durslade Farm. Glastonbury into the arcane centre of the world. by Bill Amberg and a Unlike Gloucestershire and My husband, the landscape and former war photographer curving staircase mural by Wiltshire, its neighbouring Don McCullin, came to live in Somerset even before Stein- the colourist Kaffe Fassett. counties, Somerset is a yeoman farmer’s land of smallhold- beck was enthralled. ‘There is definitely a magic here, in the www.numberonebruton.com ings and neatly contained fields lined with hedgerows. A layered history, and the storied past,’ he says to me. ‘The past spirit of egalitarianism and individualism has flourished is all around us here – a breathing, stirring, sighing pres- AT THE CHAPEL here that, in turn, has attracted a community of writers, ence.’ His desire to peel back historical layers once had him This is the restaurant that turned Bruton from a backwater artists and craftsmen. The once-forgotten Saxon backwater ranging the hills with a metal detector – only last year, a into a buzzy cultural hub. It hosts regular author talks and of Bruton, my own home town, is today a stylish retreat to vast hoard of coins dating back to William the Conqueror, a Friday-night DJ set, and is home to a wood-fired a roster of creatives, from the impresario Cameron Mack- worth some £5 million, was unearthed in the nearby Chew PHOTOGRAPHS: ALAMY, GETTY IMAGES, HARRY CORY WRIGHT, EMMA LEWIS, © MARTIN CREED/COURTESYCREED AND HAUSER OF MARTIN & WIRTH, AARON SCHUMAN, GUY HAYWARD/THE BRITISH PILGRIMAGE TRUST, © VIKKI PEARSON/STYLE & MINIMALISM, HANNAH BEAL, SOPHIA VERES PHOTOGRAPHY, TORI O’CONNOR. ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMY BLACKER pizza oven, bakery, wine shop, terrace and eight sleek, intosh to the fashion designer Phoebe Philo. Along with Valley. Today, Don is con- dog-friendly rooms. www.atthechapel.co.uk Hauser & Wirth’s Roth Bar and Grill are a host of dest- tent with a Mamiya camera ination restaurants, including At the Chapel and Osip, the alone, shooting the cloud- latter opened by the award-winning chef Merlin Labron- scape over the rolling sheep Johnson. The Newt hotel is a year old; its outlying cider hills that are washed by I AM PILGRIM orchards and extensive gardens have already attracted brooklets and a mystical Dr Guy Hayward, the legions of London admirers and endless column inches. dew that never runs dry. co-author of Britain’s Pilgrim These tend to overlook the more hidden esoteric charms of In the circumstances that Places: The First Complete DURSLADE FARMHOUSE the ancient town: the historic Holy Well and Pump House have compelled me to be Guide to Every Spiritual The Grade II-listed farm on Patwell Street, the various architectural nooks and cran- grounded, he asks me, hav- Treasure, leads modern complex was salvaged and nies, the Packhorse Bridge Stepping Stones worn smooth en’t I discovered that being worshippers on a day-long walk from restored from rack and ruin in over the River Brue in the bluebell mist of early summer. rooted to a place is no bad the sacred sites of Glastonbury to the 2007 by the gallery Hauser & Wirth, which turned Narrow pedestrian alleys called bartons lead off from the thing at all? cathedral city of Wells, accompanied it into headquarters that include an education river to the main street in the lee of the Dovecote, another by songs and blessings. You’ll follow centre, a restaurant and six bedrooms decorated mysterious 16th-century tower whose purpose is not really pathways that track migration routes known. The place has barely changed since the 1950s, in a land that has been continuously with works by artists including Paul McCarthy and when the writer John Steinbeck, a Bruton resident, would inhabited for 12,000 years.
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