Middle Stone Farm

Tell someone you’re going on holiday to Brompton Ralph and they’ll probably look at you quizzically. Tell them it’s a few miles from Huish Champflower, Lydeard St Lawrence and Clatworthy and they’ll likely be none the wiser. While other villages in the South West are well known and bustle with tourists in the summer, those close to the north Somerset coast remain blissfully quiet. And, in the case of Brompton Ralph, that’s despite the fact that it’s just three miles from the edge of Exmoor National Park and 25 minutes inland from a beach with fossil hunting to rival the Jurassic Coast. Without the fanfare of some fancy tourist attraction, there’s not much to draw you here specifically – save for a little place called Middle Stone Farm. And what a place it is.

Despite its wonderfully middle-of-nowhere location, there’s nothing middling about Middle Stone Farm. It offers top-end luxury glamping in six safari lodges, a cabin and a holiday cottage; each has a log-burning stove, a fire pit and its own hot tub – should you choose to hire it. The site makes up for the lack of local village store with an on-site licensed shop (open spring–November) offering home-cooked meals and local produce including Somerset ciders and beers. And as for a tourist attraction; how about the farm itself? It’s a 32-acre idyll with rare-breed sheep, pygmy goats, chicken, geese and alpacas. A farm tour with a tractor ride will show you the lot. There’s also table tennis, badminton and football goals as well as two children’s play areas – and all that is apart from the accommodation which is a tourist attraction in its own right.

The space and sense of adventure that comes with the safari lodges is hard to beat, whether you come as a couple or as a family. Playing games in the log-burner warmed living space or out on the deck whilst looking over glorious Somerset countryside is enough to keep you occupied for days. The lodges are separated across two fields with the bird tents, Kestrel, Buzzard and Hawk, suited for dog-owners and families with younger children (as the play area is in sight). The beach tents, Klive, Porlock and Bossington are, perhaps, better for older children and couples, though there’s not much in it. The cute Deckhouse Cabin and colourful Stable Cottage are more secluded, more solid and open all year when the area is quieter still.

If you’re here for a weekend, the appeal of the on-site attractions might just stop you from exploring off it but that would be to miss the free-roaming ponies and mythical moorlands of England’s least-visited national park, the subtropical gardens of Dunster Castle, the picturesque fishing port of Porlock Weir and the fossil treasure-trove at Klive beach. If you don’t want to miss all that, our suggestion is to forget about a weekend in the middle of nowhere and to book yourself in for a week instead.