Looms & Larders: A Tale of Tartan and Taste
3 October 2025
Some crafts aren’t learned so much as lived. You feel them in your hands
The steady beat of a loom, the patience of a kitchen garden and the skills passed down like heirlooms. They teach you to notice the world and to work with what the land provides – proof that the richest rewards often come from what’s already close at hand.
Britain has always been a nation of makers and growers, its heritage stitched into fabric and simmered into food. Weaving and spinning once sat alongside baking and brewing, as much a part of daily life as the food on the table. Medieval guilds safeguarded recipes and patterns, Victorian gardens turned estates into abundant larders and local crafts built identities that still endure. That’s why a tartan is never just a pattern – it’s a record of clan and landscape. A recipe is never just ingredients – it tells a story of resilience and celebration. From hand-dyed threads echoing Highland hills to orchard fruits pressed into cider, everything we create reflects who we are and where we’ve come from. That sense of place is what keeps British food culture alive, where tradition and imagination thrive together.
This autumn you can step into that story with PoB Hotels and Scottish textile designer Araminta Campbell in Looms & Larders: A Tale of Tartan and Taste – a celebration of heritage, creativity and flavour. Across the country chefs and makers are reimagining local traditions through dishes and designs, proving that artisan craftsmanship is most rewarding when tied to place. And for you, it’s a chance to experience the very best of luxury hotels UK, where food and textiles meet like threads in a tapestry.
Colour from the Garden
From above, the Sussex countryside looks patchworked: meadows, woodland, sloping fields and gardens that grow faster than you can eat. Here walled gardens once fed grand estates, stretching the seasons with glasshouses and clever planting. Today chefs carry that knowledge forward, demonstrating that produce pulled straight from the soil has a flavour you can’t fake.
At Gravetye Manor the garden is more than a backdrop – it’s part of the show. Beetroot gleams like polished rubies before being paired with Slipcote cheese, pumpkin seeds and lovage. Executive Chef Martin Carabott gives vegetables the kind of reverence usually saved for truffles. Try his beetroot dish and you’ll see why: the humblest roots can outshine everything else. That’s the magic of seasonal ingredients when you let them speak for themselves.
A Rare Breed Returns
In Buckinghamshire the valleys are dotted with orchards, where ducks wander as if they own the land. Poultry has always been central here. The Aylesbury Duck once ruled English tables, prized in London markets and even sung about in nursery rhymes. Industrial farming nearly wiped it out – but in quiet corners the breed endured.
At Hartwell House & Spa this once mighty duck has its stage again. Raised slowly beneath orchard trees by a sixth-generation farmer, it carries echoes of a food culture almost lost. Executive Head Chef Daniel Richardson calls it “essential in my kitchen” – and with good reason. The meat is tender, subtly gamey and touched with orchard sweetness. Eating it feels like more than dinner: it’s a taste of tradition, showing how heritage recipes adapt while staying true to their roots.
Sweet Indulgence
East Anglia stretches under endless skies, hedgerows heavy with fruit and fields swaying like fabric in the wind. Medieval wool towns shaped the county’s fortunes, orchards once supplied London’s cider markets and abundance became part of its identity. Here, food is tied to memory as much as to harvest.
In Newmarket, Bedford Lodge Hotel & Spa captures that spirit of plenty with the Lucky Horseshoe dessert: dark chocolate, salted caramel, fruit gels and Champagne sorbet layered with indulgent precision. It is a dish designed to linger, like the finish of a good wine. Travel on a little further and you arrive in Colchester where Talbooth House & Spa draws on autumn’s larder with butter-roast venison served alongside blackberries poached in vanilla and thyme. One bite recalls the joy of bramble-picking on late summer days, only now elevated into something elegant and assured. It illustrates how luxury hotels UK combine memory with refinement, turning seasonal ingredients into food that feels both nostalgic and new.
Flavours in Balance
Rutland was once overlooked in guidebooks, but food lovers know it for careful farming and a tradition of making much from little. Somerset, by contrast, is cider country, a land where orchards stretch across hillsides and winter cabbages feed whole communities. Both regions remind us that scale has little to do with substance.
At Hambleton Hall in Rutland, crab apples enjoy their moment in the spotlight. Usually dismissed as too tart, here they are whipped into a soufflé so airy it feels almost weightless. Down in Somerset, Homewood champions January King cabbage, a hardy winter crop whose crinkled leaves hide unexpected sweetness when cooked simply. Together these dishes highlight how British food culture thrives when it honours nature’s rhythm, proving that modest ingredients have their own quiet grandeur.
Forests, Lochs and Local Craft
Scotland has a way of enveloping you in its landscape, with mist curling off lochs, forests hiding their treasures and hills rolling out like a bolt of tartan. For centuries communities here lived by what the land could provide: venison from the glens, salmon from the rivers, barley for whisky and wool for weaving. Today those threads of sustenance remain woven into daily life, even as they are reinterpreted for modern tastes.
In Perthshire, Cromlix embodies that tradition with crisp Albert Bartlett potatoes and grilled steak, food that comforts after a bracing walk across moorland. Executive Head Chef James Mearing finds deep satisfaction in ingredients that offer instant reassurance, especially on cold days when warmth is welcome. Cromlix also opens the door to Araminta Campbell’s atelier on the edge of Edinburgh, where the artistry of her textiles meets Mearing’s culinary craft. Food and fabric side by side, both telling Scotland’s story through artisan craftsmanship.
Back in the capital, tempo shifts. At Leith docks, Fingal, once a lighthouse service ship, now floats as a luxury hotel with a style that matches Edinburgh’s energy. Here chanterelle mushrooms, foraged from hidden Perthshire woods, arrive golden and aromatic, sautéed just enough to let their natural flavour shine. On board, Araminta’s bespoke scarves appear in the gift collection, a playful mix of food, fashion and Scottish spirit.
Fancy weaving yourself into the full experience? Looms & Larders: A Tale of Tartan and Taste is a Scottish escape where heritage and luxury meet. Think handwoven textiles by Araminta Campbell, seasonal feasts crafted by top chefs and stays that span not only the countryside charm of Cromlix and the floating glamour of Fingal, but other equally distinctive properties – all threaded together in a break that celebrates the nation’s style, flavour and story.
Island Traditions
Sail south and Jersey feels like its own small world. Recipes are passed down like heirlooms with Black Butter – apples, cider and spice stirred into a dark, glossy preserve – among the island’s most treasured. Centuries ago whole communities gathered through the night, singing and stirring together.
At The Atlantic Hotel that tradition – the stirring rather than the singing – continues with black butter paired with an apple tarte fine that is crisp, sweet and full of heritage. Every bite shows how heritage recipes endure when they’re cherished, carrying memory and belonging in equal measure.
Woven Stories
From Sussex beetroot to Buckinghamshire ducks, blackberry-rich venison in East Anglia to hearty potatoes in Perthshire, Looms & Larders presents Britain as a living tapestry of tastes and textures. Each dish, like each woven piece, holds a sense of place, turning soil into flavour, landscape into pattern and memory into something to be shared.
Craft, whether cooked or woven, is not about excess. It’s about patience, intention and the joy of making something lasting. A scarf carries the memory of the hills it came from, just as a dish reflects the season that shaped it. When you pause long enough to savour them, you become part of that tradition too, carrying it forward one thread and one flavour at a time. That is the essence of British food culture, preserved in luxury hotels UK and carried on through heritage recipes.
To continue the journey beyond these pages, we invite you to explore over 28 exclusive dishes created by our chefs – each one a tribute to seasonal ingredients and long-held traditions, all waiting to be savoured here.
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