B&B adds revenue to help farm to prosper

MARY Pearson is hard at work pressing apples she has collected when the D&S Times calls in for one of her awardwinning breakfasts.

The resulting juice, your correspondent can confirm, is delicious – just the thing to help wash down the equally-tasty full English which emerges minutes later from the stove.

With such attention to detail, it is not surprising Mary and husband John were judged to provide the best breakfast in the county at last month’s Deliciouslyorkshire awards.

The judge who visited was bowled over by the warm welcome, pleasant surroundings, quality of food and excellent customer service.

The couple work Lovesome Hill Farm, just north of Northallerton, and offer visitors the choice of five en suite B&B rooms or more basic accommodation in a bunkhouse built for ten.

It is, however, still very much a working farm.

Lovesome Hill is a mixed farm covering 165 acres.

John keeps a 120-strong herd of beef cattle – Continentals – plus 17 Aberdeen Angus suckler cows.

In addition there is a flock of 100 sheep, mainly Mules, and some “B&B pigs” which John looks after for other farmers.

Wheat, barley and oilseed rape are the crops grown in Lovesome Hill’s fields.

The farm has been in the family since 1940, explains John. Originally part of the Hutton Bonville estate, John’s father Charlie was the sitting tenant when the opportunity to buy the farm came up in the 1950s. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Having married in 1979, and with two young sons to bring up, Mary said the idea to open up as a B&B was simple.

“It was something I could do at home,” she said. “Having been brought up and lived on a farm, I was always used to doing things inside.”

It was, said Mary, simply a case of putting out a sign on the roadside. “We just took the plunge, although I did want to do it as well as I could and do it properly.

“I did a course on business management and we did go with the tourist board and Farmstay right away.”

Initially, the couple let one room in the main farmhouse building. Later came the conversion of an old granary building into four en suite rooms and the bunkhouse, a project which earned the couple an award from the Country Landowners’ Association in the mid-1990s.

Lonesome Hill Farm’s setting makes it an ideal stopping off point for coast-tocoast walkers.

“The coast-to-coasters come from all over. We have seen something of a change in them – there seem to be more middle-aged people doing it now,” said Mary.

There are also many regular visitors who, said Mary, have become friends rather than paying customers. “You do get attached to some of the guests. They are like friends coming back to visit.”

Some travel thousands of miles while others drop in from much closer to home.

“We have a group from Australia who come and we have had three generations of people from one family in New Hampshire who have been coming for quite a few years. We have also been to a few different places around the world through the people we have met.”

After another busy season, business is quietening down as winter approaches.

The B&B remains open for most of the year although at Christmas and New Year it may be just room only for those visiting family and needing a bed on which to lay their head.

Come the New Year and the couple look forward to a relatively recent innovation – lambing breaks.

Visitors spend two days with John and Mary where they get involved “as much or as little as they want”.

On one memorable occasion, a lambing break guest was so moved he got down on bended knee to propose to his partner.

Running the B&B remains very much a joint operation, with John “front of house”

serving tea, coffee and toast and Mary beavering away in the kitchen.

“We both do it together and we enjoy it,” Mary said.