High standards of grub are the norm in West Somerset

Wandering through the Vale of Taunton recently, I reflected that few places on earth could be more fair in April-time. The trees were still mostly bare but the blossom was out in many places, and the entire countryside bore an air of expectation and awakening in the pale, tentative sunlight. The carpet of arable, pasture and woodland leans upward from the valley bottom into the Brendon and Blackdown hills, with the Quantocks to the north-east. Not much has changed here in 100 years or indeed 200. The landscape is a magical blend of man’s making and pure nature. Here is farming and nothing else: no industry, few roads of any consequence, a single railway line resurrected from the Beeching massacre of half a century ago, its trains whistling mournfully from time to time. Each farm is connected to the one-lane ‘main’ road by a track sometimes a mile or two long, and is the true link of this rural kingdom. All are named on the Ordnance Survey one-inch map. And such names! There is Oxenleaze farm and Chubworthy farm, High Chieflowan and Uplowman, Windwhistle and Nicholashayne, Garlandhayes and Noble Hindrance, Lovelywell and Slantycombe. What utilitarian but nonetheless inspired poet was the nomenclator of this ancient region?

Some names go back many centuries to times when French was still the tongue of the ruling landed class and Latin the language of documents. The village names reflect those days. There is Beggearn Huish and Huish Barton, as well as Huish Champflower. King’s Brompton is not far from Brompton Regis — both part of the royal estates, plainly — and then there is Brompton Ralph. Who was Ralph? The one-time owner of these broad acres, as well as tol and team, sac and soc, and infangentheof. I remember the name because Evelyn Waugh, living in the Vale of Taunton at Combe Florey, and who often consulted the map in search of names for his fictional characters, seized on Brompton Ralph, cunningly inverted it, and produced Sir Ralph Brompton, the sinister left-wing diplomat of Unconditional Surrender, said to have been based on Harold Nicolson.