Pigging out

The Pig at Combe is a restaurant 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 Martha Gellhorn looking around a hotel function room in Spain and realising 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 haunted night here 15 years ago, after covering something Jane Austen-related nearby. That is an occupational hazard 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 growing brand in country house hotels. There is a Pig on the Beach at Studland, a Pig in Brockenhurst, a Pig near Bath and a Pig in the Wall at Southampton.