Woods

4 Bank Square, Dulverton, Somerset; 01398 324007, Mon-Sun, lunch, noon-2pm; dinner, 7pm-9.30pm

Ratings: 5/5 Top of the tree, 4/5 Branch out, 3/5 A new leaf, 2/5 Wooden spoon, 1/5 Forrest Gump

One of the many glories of Exmoor, a rugged landscape where shaggy little ponies nibble on heathered uplands, where plashy streams burble through hidden valleys and sheep safely graze on plump green hills, etc etc etc, is that there are no restaurants.

I’ve lived on Exmoor on and off all my life, and I’ve never eaten in a restaurant there, not once. Nor do I know anybody who has. My grandparents farmed on Exmoor, and not only did they never once go to a restaurant, they never went to a dinner party either. Exmoor is about horses. It’s about hunting, shooting and fishing, and it’s a place where a friend in tweed is a friend indeed. So when it comes to food, it’s all been about staying in and great sporting pubs.

So I’ve been many times, over the years, to the celebrated Royal Oaks in Winsford and Withypool, low-beamed places to sozzle yourself in Exmoor Ales and consume vats of clotted cream (any foodstuff west of Bristol is correctly regarded as a vehicle for clotted cream). I’ve been to the Poltimore Arms, where the landlord manages to produce the best fish pie in the world from a galley kitchen that runs off a little generator beating its frantic staccato from a lean-to, and remote du Maurier-ish moorland pubs, where farmers in moleskin are accelerating their own arrhythmia via huge platters of home-cooked protein.

But restaurants? Never. I know there’s the Damien Hirst place in Ilfracombe, to which anxious trendies make annual pilgrimages, and Andrew’s on the Weir in Porlock Weir, canteen to the local literati (Margaret Drabble, Christopher Ondaatje and so on), but it would never occur to me to go to them. It would be against nature to get all dressed up and drive along winding lanes to sit at a table dressed in linen, with gleaming flatware and shining stemware (I do love these wedding-list Americanisms), while a waiter placed fishy little amuse-gueules in front of me and flapped my napkin, and the glum marrieds in the corner exchanged pleasantries in hushed tones.

No. If you live on Exmoor, “eating out” means a pasty, to be ingested midhunt in three bites, before returning to the chase; it means a venison burger or a cheese sandwich — the ratio of cheddar to margarine must be even — a packet of crisps and a beaker of tea, purchased for less than a pound from a stall at a fete or country show. It means one of Paul’s pork pies from Winsford Stores, or one of Mrs Nelder’s scotch eggs, still warm from the deep-fat fryer, eaten during an intensely private moment in the car.

The late August day I went to my first restaurant on Exmoor ever, I had attended the annual Hawkridge Revel. The revel is a gymkhana held on a windswept hillside, like a breast just below the purple shoulders of the moor, close to the land where my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Amos Williams, had a farm. For days beforehand, and for miles around, the hand-painted signs pointed “to the show”, and on the great day, the gods smiled, and a blue crack appeared in the grey, lowering sky. Land Rovers and trailers in their rattling hundreds converged on Hawkridge. The bunting flapped and the Tannoy blared. “Here’s Tamsin on Tuppence . . . oops, almost a clear round! Let’s call it four faults. Next we have No 403, Sam on Tinkerbell . . . that’s a time fault. Now here’s Ella on Teazel . . .” The excitement, as you can imagine, after six solid weeks of rain, uninterrupted home-cooking and continuous pasty-eating, was almost unbearable. A revel . . . followed by a restaurant! All in one day!

And for lunch that day — not that food can ever be the main event at a show that includes a fancy-dress parade for ponies — the refreshments were cheese sandwiches, ham sandwiches, mini-pasties or sausage rolls. That’s it. So with only one flimsy sandwich on the hill inside me, eaten while watching the dog-and-handler race, I was more than ready to break my duck at Woods in Dulverton, a small but perfectly formed town cleft by the River Barle at the foot of Exmoor.

As soon as you step inside, and ruddy faces look up from their pints at the bar, dogs thump their tails on the ground and Paddy Groves, the owner, opens a bottle of something delicious from the New World with a flourish, you realise: yes, this is a restaurant, but it’s so unponcy that it offers all the advantages of staying in — woodburning stoves, hunting prints and paraphernalia, dogs and wellies indoors — and none of the obvious downsides (washing up, family, the same food).

The room, which used to be a bakery and tearoom, has been split roughly into two bits, a bar and a restaurant, and is winning awards for all of it — the beer, the wine and the food.

Diners eat at mismatched oaken tables, rather like horses in wooden stalls, while drinkers cluster around the bar and smaller tables and provide a hale backdrop of Somerset carousing, but never so much of a wall of sound that the diners — 75% local, some who drive from as far as Bristol — have to shout. We shoved our wellies under a table for two. On the wall above our heads was a mounted otter’s foot, a stuffed hare, a large print of a man attending to a dog’s injured paw while another hound howled in sympathy, and several antlers. With Paddy’s dogs (whippets crossed with bedlington lurchers, bred for badger-digging) nosing about and everyone talking and eating at the same time, I felt right at home, especially when I decided that the blonde by the window wasn’t Anneka Rice.

Until the food came, that is. Even though Olivier Certain, the Provençal head chef, was off that night, I never suspected this until my starter, a pink and juicy slab of pigeon terrine with liver parfait and duck rillette, arrived, minus the advertised quail’s egg, and the waitress told me that the only bread in the house was melba toast. I had a greedy forkful of my husband’s twice-baked roquefort soufflé, and it tasted as I’d hoped it would — like burnt rugger socks — and I gave a little groan of pleasure. I wolfed a sirloin steak with tomatoes, mushrooms, chips and tarragon butter (a dish that I’ve decided is the long-overdue evening version of the full English breakfast). My husband resisted my calls to have it too (“Darling, you never get steak at home with me . . .”) and lapped up sea bass on saffron couscous, followed by a trio of handmade ice creams. Apart from a stumble with my pudding of poached peach and ginger ice cream, the sous-chef had definitely executed a clear round.

I can offer no higher praise for Woods than this. It is unpretentious, wild, woolly and woody. Indeed, it is so Exmoor that I can almost imagine my hill-farming grandparents, who were much more interested in their dogs and sheep than what they put in their mouths, might have eaten there.

AA Gill is away

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