Hotel review: Fowlescombe Farm

What’s the vibe?

Somewhere between Paddington and Totnes, it dawns on me that I’ve packed spectacularly badly. No raincoat, no jumper, no walking boots. Instead: a Dyson hairdryer and an eye mask. It’s an admirable selection for a stay at a working farm. Fowlescombe Farm, to be precise – a recently opened regenerative rural retreat (staunchly refusing the hotel label) with rooms, a restaurant, an array of activities, endless pastures, and more piglets than the casting of Charlotte’s Web.

Miraculously, you can arrive here dressed like Elle Woods and the team will sort you out. Branded Fowlescombe raincoats, wellies, and the general sense that someone will soon hand you a mug of something warm. Fowlescombe, with roots stretching back to the Tudor period, carries nearly half a millennium of history.The abandoned manor house dominates the grounds, a crumbling relic held together by ivy alone. Bedrooms, by contrast, are structurally sound and split between a Victorian farmhouse and adjoining stone barns. Wherever you stay, it feels like home.

Fowlescombe Farm bedroom

Jon Tonks

I was based in the farmhouse, where the communal living room opens onto a kitchen (complete with boiling water tap) and honesty bar well-stocked with tipples, ranging from Cocchi Americano to cassis to Campari. There’s always a hulking cake on the living room table, the hearth is perpetually lit, and a jigsaw puzzle awaits your brainpower. It has the air of a Christmas idyll, minus the family feuds and red-wine carpet disasters.

The food and drink

Dinner at The Refectory

Jon Tonks

When you’re staying on 450 acres of working farmland, the menu more or less writes itself from what grows, grazes, and grunts nearby. The vegetable patches and greenhouses around the farmhouse are indecently abundant (more Borough Market than back garden). You can lose an afternoon gawping at the technicolour rows of rainbow chard, tomato-laden vines and squash leaves so large they could double as parasols.

The restaurant, The Refectory, is where all this bounty lands on your fork. Much is made in-house: butter, fruit preserves, bread, charcuterie cured on site, pickles, and even seasonal cocktails infused with thrifty garden and hedgerow tinctures. Food at Fowlescombe is nourishing, uncomplicated, and reassuringly rustic. Lunch might consist of a herb-packed omelette or soup made from whatever the garden’s yielding that week, with yesterday’s bread turned into croutons.

The Refectory

Matt Hague

Dinner follows a similar comforting thread, with a smidge more ceremony: treacle bloomer, farm salami, velouté, then plates of seasonal vegetables and meat raised just a few metres away. I arrive just as tomato season gives way to pumpkins – one last fling of tomato consommé before the pumpkin tart appears.

Breakfast in the morning skews south-west: a full Fowlescombe (including home-cured bacon and sausages), apple juice from the orchard, eggs royale with trout and a Salcombe smokie for the omega-3 heads. Much of the produce you’ll recognise from the farm tour – the eggs, leafy greens and the, er, Tamworth pigs.

The Refectory

Matt Hague

What to do

Weekend guests begin the day with yoga in the greenhouse – a gentle unfurling of limbs before the onslaught of tea and cake. The farm tour is non-negotiable: you’ll tick off the agricultural Big Five (goats, cows, sheep, chickens, pigs) and, if you time it right, the Tamworth piglets. Super adorable, right up until they mistake your finger for a canapé.

Fowlescombe Farm interior

Jon Tonks

When the heavens inevitably open, the Map Room opposite the farmhouse awaits: shelves of books, jigsaws and crayons. By evening, the greenhouse reboots as a gin-tasting den hosted by Pim Wolfs (hotel manager), who will guide you through botanicals until you roll into dinner borderline horizontal.