A woman from London has completed a decade-long mission to sample a scone at every National Trust location with a tearoom or restaurant.
Sarah Merker, 49, from Isleworth, west London, tasted scones at 244 National Trust sites across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Merker ranked and reviewed each scone on her blog, nationaltrustscones.com.
Merker completed her goal on Wednesday when she visited the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, where she sampled one last scone. On Twitter, she described it as “fresh, warm and absolutely delicious”.
“It’s all very emotional, it’s been a weird experience,” Merker told the PA news agency. “It’s just played a very important part of my life.
“I don’t know what I’d call it – it’s more than a hobby … It’s taken up a lot of my time and effort over the past 10 years and I’ll really miss it.”
Merker, a marketing director, started the National Trust scone project in August 2013 with the ambition of “visiting every National Trust property and having a scone at it” where possible, she said in her blog.
She shared some of the journey with her husband, Peter, who died from cancer in 2018. The couple had visited the Giant’s Causeway before they became National Trust members in 2013, which inspired Merker to end the project at the site as a way to honour Peter.
“He’d been there for so much of it and obviously I have memories of doing it with him,” she said.
“So, for me, it was really important to finish it for him as well – I wanted to make sure I got to the end.”
Armed with her £84 annual membership, Merker began rating and reviewing the scones at all locations where scones were available, which involved visiting every National Trust property that had a cup symbol by it in the National Trust 2022 handbook, indicating it had a food outlet, she explained on her blog.
“I thought it would take me maybe five years or something. I didn’t expect to do it quickly,” she said, “but I didn’t think it would take me 10 years.”
In doing so, Merker said she had found the key to a good scone. “There is a secret to scones and it’s the easiest secret ever,” she said. “The secret to a scone is that it has to be fresh.”
Merker rated a scone from her visit to the Prior Park Landscape Garden in January 2023 as five out of five and described it as a triumph on her blog.
A Christmas pudding scone with brandy butter at Treasurer’s House in Yorkshire was one of Merker’s favourite scones, which she said was “off the scale delicious” in her blog entry. “That first bite of [the] Christmas pudding scone with brandy butter will remain with me for a very long time.” She scored it 5+ out of 5.
Merker has released a book, The National Trust Book of Scones, which includes 50 scone recipes from National Trust experts around the country and extracts from her blog.
