LIFE
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 fam-
ily, who have been planting trees
since before Martin Luther got angry.
Francis Fulford told me that estates
last longer down here — his, at Great
Fulford, has been owned by his fam-
ily since King Richard’s time. There
are apparently fewer temptations to
ruin in Devon than, say, Berkshire. It
is more grand than beautiful, but as
soon as I see a vast fire in the grate
in the hallway that is now a cocktail
bar — and it was a warm day, too
— I am glad that I came to the Pig.T
he Pig at Combe is a restau-
rant 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 Mar-
tha Gellhorn looking around a hotel
function room in Spain and realis-
ing 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 haunt-
ed night here 15 years ago, after cov-
ering something Jane Austen-related
nearby. That is an occupational haz-
ard 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 grow-
ing brand in country house hotels.
There is a Pig on the Beach at Stud-
land, a Pig in Brockenhurst, a Pig near
Bath and a Pig in the Wall at South-
ampton. 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
The best way to describe the Pig is
that it is like Babington House in Som-
erset — Soho House in the country
— but marginally less hateful. There
are smooth grey rooms with pur-
ple velvet sofas, it is true, and lines of
pink Hunter wellies to borrow under
sweeping staircases. They are arranged
in height, as if for toddlers. There are
many Range Rovers outside. But
somehow, being in Devon, not Som-
erset, it feels far less like London in
the countryside than the countryside
being a bit like London. It is an impor-
tant distinction, for it means that there
are no 50-year-old millennials seek-
ing adult-only ball pits and fantasising
about riding unicycles round the park.
Ideally, they would fall off.
It is richly, and beautifully deco-
rated: the dining rooms look like
mad, spindly gardens that have
walked into the house, and the tables
are occupied by large families, and
even babies of the suave, but not the
most suave kind. I did not for instance
see a baby wearing cashmere neutrals,
which is a fashionable country house
hotel trope.
It is the last warm Sunday of the
year, so we eat outside, plainly, prettily
— more prettily than in a pub — and
very well: roast pork for him, roast
beef for me, and spaghetti for the
child. Of course, you should not real-
ly serve Yorkshire pudding with roast
pork and crackling, but he is happy,
and what else matters?
So I would return to the Pig. Or
any Pig. Perhaps next time I would
recognise it.The Pig at Combe, Gittisham, Honiton,
Devon, EX14 3AD, tel: 01404 540 400.Food
Pigging out
Tanya Gold
It is lik e Soho
House in the
country –
but marginally
less hatefulRadio 3 tries to distract listeners
from music by posing little
quizzes and hearing quirky details
of history from a ‘time traveller’.
Last Wednesday we were assured
that on the wagon, meaning
‘abstaining from alcohol’, derived
somehow from condemned
prisoners being taken from
Newgate to Tyburn and having a
last drink at St Giles’s.
This is definitely not the
origin of the phrase. That reliable
philologist Michael Quinion gave
the true version in his blog World
Wide Words in 1998.
The journey to Tyburn was
a staple of popular miscellanies
such as Hone’s Year Book andChambers Book of Days, and
earlier of fictionalised histories
like Jonathan Wild (1725) and
The Beggar’s Opera (1728).
Those convicted of treason were
dragged to the gallows on a
hurdle. Ordinary murderers went
in an open cart. Accounts do not
call it a wagon.
In James Shirley’s play The
Wedding (1629), the miser
Rawbone imagines his own
journey: ‘Now I’m in the cart,
riding up Holborn... now I feelmy toes hang i’ the cart; now
’tis drawn away; now, now, now!
— I’m gone!’
Swift’s poem on ‘Clever Tom
Clinch’, hanged in 1727, says
that ‘He stopped at the George
for a bottle of sack,’ with the
traditional joke, ‘And promised to
pay for it—when he came back.’
He rode on a cart: ‘And when his
last speech the loud hawkers did
cry / He swore from his cart “It
was all a damned lie”.’
Earl Ferrers, hanged in 1760
for murder, aspired to something
better than the Tyburn cart,
using his influence to ride in his
own landau with six horses. But
the clergyman William Dodd,convicted of forging a signature
in 1777, shared an open cart with
another felon.
So forget wagons to Tyburn.
In any case, hanging at Tyburn
ended in 1783, and the earliest
citation of on the wagon is from- A little earlier, in 1889, in
the United Service magazine, is
the exchange: ‘ “Let me give you
a dose of rum.” “No, thanks,”
was the reply; “I’m on the water-
wagon.” ’
The metaphor is to be on the
water wagon for abstinence; falling
off the wagon for indulgence.
My husband has never scrambled
onto the wagon yet.
— Dot Wordsworth
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE
On the wagon‘At the moment we’re torn between these two...’