Easter Tour – Day 6 – Darts Farm and updates

Today was another quiet holiday day. We generally expected that the Bank Holiday weekend would be a quite one but we are back on the road tomorrow. First off is a visit to Conker shoes in Totnes. As well as being fascinated by their manufacturing Lucan is desperate for new shoes so we are hoping to find him a nice pair to take back to Kent. Then in the afternoon we trek to Taunton to visit our new Twitter buddies Shakespeare Glass. I am particularly fascinated with the craft of glass blowing so I hope to to get some great pictures… and maybe even help out. One of the reasons that we are telling you all this now is that we are, for the next 2 days, staying in a yurt in Sharpham and are a little concerned that we may be incommunicado. If you do not hear from us for a day or so do not send out the search party, we are simply getting back to basics without electricity and WiFi, both rather crucial for a blog 😉

So back to today, we did visit Darts Farm, which was absolutely manic and not without stress. What with the sheer number of people and the isles too small for a kids buggy we did struggle to see much of what they had on offer. But it was great to see some of our old friends being promoted all in one place; House of Dorchester, Chococo, Tregothnan, Sharpham Park, Camel Valley were all represented. We were also presented with a whole display of English wines, the likes of which we wish other retailers would take note. However, much of their house and garden wares appeared to be Chinese imports by virtue of the fact that they did not state the country of manufacture. This meant that we only bought a bottle of wine and some delicious looking cheese while there.

We then headed back to our new hotel for the night. A rather cheap and not so cheerful Best Western on the outskirts of Totnes. We were excited to listen to today’s BBC Radio 4 You & Yours program which featured a number of our other friends: Kate Hill from Make It British, Denver Hewlett from Stoves and James Eden from Private White V.C. It was a whole episode assessing the advantages (or otherwise) of manufacturing in the UK. If you have a spare hour it is still on BBC on-demand.