Travel
The Pig in New Forest in August
Sunflowers the colour of dried blood, a sage-green glasshouse, and the kind of kitchen garden that makes August feel like the best time to be anywhere
Travel
The Pig at Harlyn Bay
A Cornish farmhouse above the bay, dark-panelled rooms full of lamplight, and a walled kitchen garden in full June swing — the Pig does it again, this time with the sea at its back
Another Pig, and somehow always the same quiet thrill of arriving. Harlyn Bay sits low and grey-stone above the north Cornish coast, close enough that the light has that washed, salty brightness to it and the wind comes over the wall with the smell of the sea in it.
You come in through a studded door into the dark, and the whole Pig language is there waiting: panelling rubbed back to look a hundred years older than it is, lamplight everywhere, old maps of Cornwall in gilt frames, an apothecary's chest doing duty as a reception desk with an olive tree on top. Velvet sofas in green and faded blue, portraits of strangers over the fireplaces, a long open door framing the lawn like a painting. You could lose an afternoon just moving from one chair to the next.
But it's the kitchen garden I always come for, and Harlyn's is a beauty — a proper walled one, Kitchen Garden over the arch and Mind Your Head swinging below it. Inside, the gravel paths run dead straight between the beds and June has everything going at once: rainbow chard spilling out in reds and golds, oak-red and green lettuces laid out like a sampler, onions and leeks standing to attention, cornflowers gone electric blue along the edges, and the squash and courgettes sprawling everywhere with their first yellow flowers open. One bed labelled, very seriously, Winter Squash — Sweet Dumpling. Cloches and fine netting hooped over the tender things.
At the far end, the glasshouse — a long, pale-framed Alitex thing with a brick base and a hedge of rosemary and lavender breaking against it, figs and vines trained up inside. We wandered the whole thing twice, pruned a bit where we shouldn't have, took the same photo from every angle.
And then the light went long and gold, the way it always seems to at the Pig, and we walked the lawns back to the house in it — the stone turning honey-coloured, the chimneys black against an apricot sky. The garden feeds the kitchen feeds the plate; every Pig does the same trick. Harlyn just does it with the Atlantic over the wall.
