Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Pigging out

The Pig at Combe is a restaurant in a country house hotel in a valley in Devon. I actually went to the Combe when it was only a country house hotel but, unlike Martha Gellhorn looking around a hotel function room in Spain and realising it had been an operating theatre in the Civil War, I did not recognise it. I spent three hours eating there, and I missed it until I looked it up and realised I spent a slightly haunted night here 15 years ago, after covering something Jane Austen-related nearby. That is an occupational hazard of the female newspaper feature writer, and that cold blue-and-white wall-paper will be dead now too. It was swallowed by a suave pig.

There are multiple Pigs; it is a growing brand in country house hotels. There is a Pig on the Beach at Studland, a Pig in Brockenhurst, a Pig near Bath and a Pig in the Wall at Southampton. It is, I fancy, a faint homage to a Cowshed Spa, where you can buy beauty products called Knackered Cow and Horny Cow if you can be bothered to be that self-loathing and whimsical while in possession of a slightly softer bottom, which I can’t.

It was not always a country house hotel, of course; there was a whole culture before they existed, so I can only be thankful that detective fiction didn’t exist either, for where would it have lived? It was, and is, a house. It looks Tudor from a distance, and Victorian close up, and, like all the most interesting country houses, it is both, with plenty in between. Dead men didn’t buy cars, if rich. They built wings.

Its owners were an ancient family, who have been planting trees since before Martin Luther got angry.

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