When we grill in fields of gold

The great outdoors offers many opportunities to host BBQ events, with estates and farms lighting up rural England. ISABELLE GRAY finds acres of space.

The combination of fire and food has been a cornerstone of ritual and celebration for millennia. It remains at the heart of many traditions and festivals that fill our calendars today. But once you step off the path of familiar food-focused festivals, there is a quiet revival happening among farms and estates across the UK that are shaking things up. While the events differ, they share a common thread of gathering people together over food and flame.

Drive across Bristol’s iconic suspension bridge, 15 minutes away from the city, and it’s easy to forget that there was ever a city at all. Belmont Estate, a 400-acre regenerative farming and rewilding project, is home to the Rossiter family, who put nature, climate and community at the heart of their vision for the land. Part of doing so is hosting events that invite both corporate partners and the public to join in the feast.

“Community, for us, is about finding opportunities to bring people together and using local, organic food as a facilitator to spark those connections,” says Henry Rossiter, whose family began purchasing parts of the estate back in 2012. And you couldn’t get much more local: Belmont’s free-roaming Red Ruby Devon cows that produce its beef are 100% grass-fed and organic, while Exmoor Horn sheep live a leisurely life grazing the estate’s wildflower
meadows.

With its own greenhouse, vegetable beds and allotment garden, the estate endeavours to use as much as possible of its own produce, cooked over fire, at dining events. Such events include long table feasting experiences open to the public (Big Nath’s BBQ, featured in the Summer issue), or immersive foraging, butchery, or cooking with fire courses for corporate partners who have invested in Belmont’s climate, nature and community projects.

“Reconnecting with the land by way of eating food produced onsite, cooked with the element of fire, highlights our place within nature and not outside of it. This is a key message in Belmont’s mission.”

While Pennard Hill Farm plays host to weddings and glamping for Glastonbury Festival during the summer, the autumn and winter seasons see chef Tom Godber-Ford Moore and his wife Pippa run a series of farm feasts, the menus of which are entirely dictated by the produce of the land they farm.

The influence of Godber-Ford Moore’s fire-cooking skills, honed from years of outdoor events, and much of a career spent in the Mediterranean are clear to see in the food and set-up of the feasts. Mangalitza pigs, Herdwick sheep, and Bresse chickens are all menu features, farmed on a small scale to prioritise flavour, welfare and sustainability before they are cooked over a large fire in the barn. Preserved vegetables grown from their no-dig garden often feature, in true Med style, as an appetiser alongside charcuterie from the Mangalitza pigs.

More fire-led feasting can be found when you venture further into the depths of the south-west. Nancarrow Farm, a working organic farm and wedding venue just outside of Truro, Cornwall, hosts monthly gatherings with a three-course set menu, showcasing the farm’s seasonal produce to the backdrop of a live folk band. Each feast at Nancarrow offers the opportunity for guests to stay overnight in a converted Grade II listed barn or renovated chicken shed through its dinner, bed and breakfast packages.

Long, banquet-style tables allow those feasting to connect while the theatre of their meals being smoked seared, seared and sizzled from the farm’s outdoor wood-fired kitchen provides entertainment during summer months. In autumn, Nancarrow will host an immersive butchery and cooking workshop. Taking place in September, Pasture to Plate offers 10 guests the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of nose-to-tail farming and cooking by breaking down a quarter of a bullock followed by a lesson in grilling, searing, and smoking a range of cuts in a chef’s table experience.

Other farms and estates are looking ahead to the value fire can bring to their businesses. Bank Farm in Kent, run by Doug Wanstall, who describes it as “a complex regenerative circular system”, already encompasses crops, a market garden, poultry for eggs and meat, a 24-hour vending farm shop called The Egg Machine, and Jack’s Barn, a wedding events business.

This year, Bank Farm is introducing three farmers markets in Jack’s Barn. “The idea is to turn Bank Farm into a food destination, building a reputation for quality food served well, simply, seasonally, and affordably,” says Wanstall.

Alongside local food and craft vendors will be a hot food offering, with meat from the farm slow-cooked over coals, accompanied with vegetables and salads grown from the market garden, championing seasonality and quality produce.

The quality of the meat at Bank Farm, as well as a searing commitment to sustainable and regenerative farming, speaks for itself. Wanstall recalls an event held in the summer by LANDED, a regular supplement from the housebuilding industry’s leading trade title Show House magazine, where even vegetarians felt comfortable eating his produce, cooked by Macknade’s Simon Maynard, because of the meat’s provenance.

“I want to demonstrate that you can eat really well on a local, seasonal basis and make delicious things with basic ingredients.”

Having recently won a silver medal from WineGB for its very first vintage, Carvers Hill Estate winery in Wiltshire is making strides as a new kid on the block of the growing English wine market. Planted in 2021, some 22,000 vines now sit on the site of a former wildflower meadow alongside a new state-of-the-art winery and events space. Le Grand Société, a members-only wine club which integrates Carvers Hill Estate with its sister vineyard, Domaine de Bellevue in Bordeaux, now has a home as well as a space to store members’ wine collections.

“The wildflowers play a huge part in our story and heritage,” says Jack Bartholomew, managing director of Carvers Hill Estate. “All the vines are intertwined with wildflowers, which has made them have to fight hard.” The result is not only a more balanced wine, but one of the most beautiful vineyards in the UK.

With a current focus on member and corporate hospitality events, as well as opening its doors to the public in late July for tours and tastings, there is definitely scope for BBQ at Carvers Hill. Jack Bartholomew says he’d eventually love to see a seasonal restaurant here, which could incorporate BBQ.” And why wouldn’t they? Their award-winning rosé, rich with a good level of acidity means it can stand up to most meats: a perfect BBQ pairing.

Community, kinship and a reverence for the land are key themes that thread through each of these stories. From our ancestral days of gathering round the flames, to the feasts, festivals and corporate activations of today, the age-old combination of fire and food is a universal language that we all share, highlighting our place within a wider ecosystem. This is the spirit that each of these farms and estates capture when they open their doors – or gates – and invite you in.

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