Malverleys must feel like actual heaven on a balmy summer’s day. Quaint, overgrown Wessex Downs country lanes turn into acres of arduously coiffed nurseries, lawns and flowerbeds, complete with a gorgeous restaurant, deli, cafe, farm and gift shop, and lecture room. It’s as if the Famous Five have gone into hospitality and asked Peter Rabbit and Mrs Tiggy-winkle to run the cottage garden: a quintessentially English, picture-book, farm-to-plate experience. When the sun shines, you can meander in the garden, take a “hand-tied bouquet workshop”, buy fresh runner beans straight off the plots and eat a rhubarb and magnolia danish pastry on the terrace.
This balmy summer meandering is, of course, pure supposition, because I turned up at Malverleys during one of summer 2023’s numerous torrential downpours. It had been raining here on and off for four whole days; the midday sky was the colour of silt and thunder cracked in the distance. Huge raindrops bounced off the car’s windscreen as customers wrestled on cagoules and sou’westers to run the short distance from the car park to the restaurant.
