Beef Encounter: a medieval banquet in Hereford

I have always wanted my own medieval Great Hall. To be able to wear velvet gowns with long sleeves that drape in the gravy, and drink from pewter tankards, with sleek hunting dogs under the table… but I digress. Medieval Great Halls are hard to come by these days, they don’t often appear on Rightmove’s property search preferences. But all is not lost; just three hours from London, in the fertile Marches valleys on the Welsh border, stands Shelwick Court, which has its very own 15th-century hall, complete with cusped and chamfered beams, and can be hired for a weekend break.

It is an astonishing space, with big sofas arranged around a wood-burning stove; dark, lustrous mahogany furniture and, best of all, a long feasting table, all dominated by those thick timbers. No one knows how the hall came to be here, or who built it. For many hundreds of years the building was a farmhouse, the magnificent ceiling hidden in an attic, and only when it was about to be demolished did a conservation officer discover the telltale quatrefoil framing. The Landmark Trust got hold of the building, renovated it and transformed it into a comfortably grand five-bedroom holiday home, a short drive from Hereford.

Our first task, after waking and taking in the views of misty, sodden fields all around, was to purchase a suitably medieval hunk of meat for our banquet that evening. Beef was the obvious choice; Hereford is famous for its cattle, and at the heart of the city is a life-size bronze statue of a bull. Fortunately our visit coincided with the monthly farmers’ market, which had a predictably meaty vibe. There was a stall doing a brisk business in faggots and Tudge’s of Ludlow was selling juicy sausages fashioned from its own free-range Berkshire pigs. We bought our rib of beef from the celebrated butcher HJ Edwards and it felt perfectly appropriate to lug it about the Jacobean black-and-white-beamed Old House, once part of a row of similar buildings, all housing butchers’ shops, and today a museum displaying 17th-century furnishings, including an ingenious baby walker.

Hereford has long been a prosperous town. The Roman army was stationed here, and it later became a Saxon capital and a stronghold of the English kings in their battles with the Welsh. It is famous for its cathedral, which we came upon after meandering down the narrow, cobbled Capuchin Yard. The cathedral has stood here for more than 1,200 years, and has wonderfully squat proportions, as though the great weight of all that carved stone has caused it to sink ever so slightly into the soft grass. Inside lies a wealth of wonders, from polychrome knights in stately, eternal slumber on their tombs, to a library of ‘chained’ books, but the real treasure is the Mappa Mundi, a 13th-century map illustrating all that was then known about the world. It doesn’t look like the maps of today; Jerusalem is at the centre, the land masses are unrecognisable, at the top are Heaven and Hell, and all about are creatures, flora and strange races of men, basilisks and mandrakes.

That afternoon we went for a walk among the evergreens in Hough Wood, in the hills above Hereford, giving us a wonderful, almost Tuscan, view of the Wye Valley with the undulating Malvern Hills in the background. On the way back we stopped off at the Bunch of Carrots pub to warm up by the fire with a pint of local Betty Bach’s ale. Then it was back to the Great Hall to feast on Welsh cakes, Hereford Hop cheese, local cider and, of course, that huge slab of beef. By the end of the evening we all felt properly medieval. ES