Posted on by maryhadow

Joy

“Whoopsadaisy!” yelled Matt, as the Honda CM 125 reared up in the dark, and described a perfect backward somersault.

“Perhaps Si should ride it back?” suggested Will.

“YIKES!” shouted Antony, flying over the handlebars of our new E-bike, and slithering down lane towards home.

I had just received one of the most joyous phone calls of my life – a dream come true after two decades of failure.

Will and his two mates – best friends since they first met at prep school over a decade ago – had been visiting The Forest Inn at the end of our lane, for a drink and a game of pool. Matt, wearing a bandeau, had gone there riding Will’s scrambling motorbike, and the other two were on the E-bikes. “We’ll be back about nine to cook you a steak!” they shouted merrily, as we passed each other in the lane, my horses remaining remarkably calm in the general milieu.

I was a bit worried that they might upset the locals and my B&Ber who was dining there, with their posh, loud, excited voices.

The call was from Will saying, “We’ve joined up with Si, Rob and Jez, and after a bit more pool we’ll all be coming back to the Bothy to chill.  So I’m afraid we won’t be doing your steak.”

It’s taken twenty years, but finally, unbelievably, at last, thanks to our jolly pub up the road, Will has re-bonded with his old mates from Widecombe Primary School, seemingly readily accepted back again into the local community.

Posted on by maryhadow

Bench Tor

My Dutch guests are mostly huge, not very witty, and arrive waving the same guidebook as every other Dutch visitor, together with a pair of those pointy walking stick things.  They have all come here to ‘hike’ across the moor. But when they discover that our paths are neither gravelled nor signed – well around here they don’t actually exist at all – they tend to lose their nerve, and resort to one of the two walks described, presumably in Dutch, in their guidebook.

Which means that if you ever venture out to Bench Tor, as I did with the Dartmoor hunt yesterday, you’ll come across thousands of Dutch people all going around in the same circle, having beaten a path for themselves over the past few years with their silly sticks.  A bit like the way you have to queue up nowadays to climb Everest, using its pre-existing steps and ropes (admittedly passing the odd corpse as you go).

The other walk listed in that wretched guidebook is the one to the miniature oak trees that comprise Wistman’s Wood. Two bumpy miles in a straight line, there and back, from your car.

Well I’ve only ever met one Dartmoor resident who’s bothered to go and have a look at Wistman’s Wood.  I’ve just ridden around it, as horses are too big to get in.

“Is it worth the effort?” I always enquire, vexed, after my so-called hiking guests have got into their hired Fiat 500, parked at The Two Bridges and had a coffee there (instead of at my mates’ Prince Hall Hotel, 200 yards away) and followed the well worn path, bumping into other Dutch people as they go.

The whole point of my B&B is that, unlike any other that I know of, you can walk in every direction, North, South, East and West, from outside my garden gate, as advertised in the first sentence of my website.  That is my USP.  That is mostly why I charge a lot.  When I get guests determined to leave their car in the drive, and, direct from my door spend the entire day trekking 20 miles across every kind of terrain and lots of rivers to the Warren House Inn, or who are thrilled to risk getting lost on their way through pouring rain to the utterly bleak, featureless Ryder’s Hill, I feel like kissing them.

Over breakfast we pore over the Ordnance Survey map which I’ve drawn all over with biro, showing them my suggested walks.  I’ve even had a bespoke map made with Wydemeet at its centre, and hung it on the wall, so that guests can get a better idea of where we live.

The irony of all this is that I never actually walk anywhere myself at all.  I am less fit than a Londoner commuting to work by tube, who goes on foot along the pavement at either end of his or her journey.  Because the whole point of horses is that you can sit down as they negotiate the hills.

And now, oh Lor – I’ve discovered E-bikes.

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Tesco’s Finest

Mitchelcroft, on the edge of the moor outside Scoriton, ranks top B&B on Dartmoor, scoring the full monty of blobs on TripAdvisor and averaging 10/10 on Booking.com. This means it’s one of the leading 100 B&Bs in the country.  I heard it has also won a European award which the owners don’t even bother to boast about on their website.  I bet they have no idea that I regularly stalk them, snooping to find out what it is they do that I can copy, that makes their place so unusually special.

Well I’m afraid I draw the line at making fresh fruit compote every morning. The best I can provide is a basic sort of fruit salady thing .

On the other hand, I can manage Eggs Royale of every configuration.  My standard version is served on Mediterranean toast, layered with quality smoked salmon (Lidl’s is good value but too spongey), fresh spinach, and sprinkled with paprika, in an attempt to take on Ashburton’s  ‘The Old Library’ which overlooks the carpark.  The Old Library specialises in brunch, and is run by properly trained award-winning chefs.  Unlike them, I can’t quite run to making the hollandaise myself.

In fact I asked the  waitress at Exeter’s fabulous ‘Cosy Club’ for their delicious recipe for this wonderful sauce, of which they use copious amounts, only to discover theirs comes out of a tetra-pack called Macphie’s, which you have to buy 20 litres at a time from a Cash and Carry.

So much emphasis these days is put on the words ‘home made’; ‘locally sourced’; and ‘organic’.

Well I have now cooked over 4,000 breakfasts, and conducted innumerable taste tests, only to conclude that a lot of what Tesco produces is better than any of Dartmoor’s offerings, and is considerably more convenient to source, as it gets delivered direct to my door by charming young men.

“Could you let me have the recipe for your bread?” I repeatedly get asked by my revered guests.  Well, no.  Tesco’s ‘wheaten loaf’ has the taste and texture of something that I could AGA-bake if I felt like it, and is only £1.10 a pop.

I’ve taken to asking the children’s old school matron to bake batches of ten chocolate cakes at a time for me, with thick icing on the top and in the middle, at £4.25 each.  It doesn’t matter if they’re rather small, as once my guests have been greeted with a couple of slices on arrival, the rest goes mouldy in a tin. But recently I’ve found some cakes which look just as home-made and are equally yummy, and are much more convenient to collect, as they come from the farm shop next door to my daughter’s school.

My real piece de resistance, however, is my sausages.  The best I could find, having tried every local butcher’s offerings, used to come from my friend who keeps a few pigs and makes her own from them.  But now I’ve discovered the unbeatable Tesco’s Finest Pork and Apple.

I challenge you to tell the difference between a butcher’s dry cured bacon – streaky or back – and Tesco’s equivalent; while Lurpac unsalted is ten times better than that bright yellow handrolled salty Cornish stuff.

Meanwhile, supermarket frozen croissants beat even fresh French ones from Provence. And are considerably more accessible.

Which leaves the eggs.  I served my neighbour’s farmyard eggs for several years, laid fresh each morning by her free-roaming birds.  During particularly busy times she would kindly bring them down for me herself, first thing in the morning.  But occasionally, for some reason the gloriously deep orange yolk would turn spherical and the white fall away – hopeless for poaching.

So these days you will see me haring around the lanes, late at night on a Sunday, determined to track down the very, very best, richest, freshest eggs on the moor.  At the moment Mad Kay’s, at £1.80 for six, tie first with those from the Mighty May’s in Dartmeet, coming in at £1.25.

Holne community village shop also sells good local eggs; as does the soon to be defunct Tuckers in Ashburton.

Whatever happens, you can be sure no guest of mine will ever be served a supermarket egg.

Posted on by maryhadow

No Customers

“We’re full next weekend,” Dan, of the Forest Inn, reports cheerfully.

“Sorry – can’t fit you in for dinner,” Charles, from the upmarket Prince Hall Country House Hotel, a ten minute drive away, tells me.

Humph.  Business for me fell off a cliff as of November 1st.  Just like last year. I’ve got two couples booked in between now, and the whole of the rest of my life.  Agh!

“It’s because you’re twice the price of the Forest Inn, and don’t provide the feeling of being socially superior like Prince Hall,” explains my cool son Will (19), who, immaculately trained by yours truly, enjoys working there as a chambermaid during university holidays, commuting on an E-bike.

I reassure myself that my guests have a special niche of their own.  For them to have tracked down ‘probably the most remote (and expensive) B&B south of the Watford Gap’, they are able, individual, discerning, well educated, successful, fit types, whose company I enjoy so much that I’d have them to stay for nothing (don’t tell them that), and I’m missing them already.

The upside is that I now use my best B&B room myself – complete with ironed Egyptian cotton bedlinen, thick fluffy white towels, separate shower and bidet, 4000 pocket-sprung mattress, and 4″ topper.

Posted on by maryhadow

Dead

My neighbour is lying, apparently dead, on the floor of our local pub.

Tom, the sous-chef is attempting to revive her, using the defibrillator that normally lives in the telephone box down the road.

My new love interest and I are are sitting watching, nursing our drinks, together with a few other locals, everybody pretending not to notice him gently massaging my inner thigh.  No one’s  seen me with a bloke in the ten years since my husband walked.

“What about giving her the kiss of life?” I suggest.

When she hears this, Ann suddenly regains consciousness and struggles up from her prone position on the green patterny carpet.

We’re all here to be taught how to use the ‘defib’ which Ann, parish councillor for the Hexworthy/Huccaby ward, had installed in 2014, and which, to my knowledge, has never been used. Tom has been on a course to learn how to demonstrate its miraculous powers.

“Have you read ‘This is Going to Hurt’?” I enquire.  “It says that for CPR to work, you have to press so hard you break their ribs.”

I’m not really here to learn about the ‘defib’ – I’ve come to support the pub. It’s sad that so few Hexworthy residents attend its events: Christmas drinks, New Year’s Eve parties, a 1970s Karaoke/Disco evening, ‘Pirates and Poldark’, live bands… there’s only one other local couple who also regularly join in with the fun.

“The Pub Is The Hub” says the Prince of Wales, who recently sold the freehold of The Forest Inn to two local families, after it had been lying empty for so long that a family of bunnies and rooks had moved in.

Soon after the pub closed I’d put my family home on eBay for £1 million – the third most expensive thing for sale on the entire site, with the intention of moving nearer to Exeter and normal people.  With no central focus, life in Hexworthy had become increasingly isolated and lonely for me, running a big house all on my own in central nowhere.

With the re-opening of the pub, now I have a sort of extra sitting room, full of people I know, where I can sit at the bar without looking desperate.  It is so life-changing for me that I’ve declared they’ll have to remove me from my home of twenty years, feet first.