Wiltshire and Gloucestershire

But the other day, a medium-sized press release squeaked inexplicably under the fence, like a pig escaping from an abattoir, and announced: “Mutton dressed as… Mutton! The Priory Inn, Tetbury, supports the menu come-back of the humble sheep.”

A modified cliché pepped up with an ellipsis and an exclamation mark followed by a superfluous hyphen – such is the strange and horrible secret language of the restaurant PR. And yet I found myself thinking: “Hmm, Prince Charles is into mutton, and so is Jamie Oliver. It’s said to be so much tastier than lamb, so much more intense and textured. It’s the last word in trend-busting ecomungous olde worlde gastropubbery. I must have some of it.”

Not fancying the look of the Priory as a place to stay (reviews compared it to the Crossroads Motel), I booked a room at the Old Bell Inn, in nearby Malmesbury, which claims to be the oldest hotel in England. Michael Winner came here in 1342, I gather, with his dear friend Joan Collins (then only 56) and thought the cask-salted otter “atrocious”, but declared the quince syllabub “historic”. Later he wrote to his dear friend, Pope Clement XII, demanding that the maître d’ be excommunicated for giving him a table too close to the plague pit.

The Old Bell has improved in the intervening 700 years (I wasn’t on a freebie, so I don’t have to be nice), and I had one of my cosiest meals in ages: rump steak and chips with a half-bottle of Château Gloria in front of the sitting-room fire, while flicking through crap old Thirties novels from the bookshelves, with titles like I Too Have Lived In Arcadia and The Cholmondeley Mansions Incident.

For lunch the next day (my Priory Inn meal was booked for the Sunday, when mutton was guaranteed) I pootled out to East­on Gray, to the flashest new hotel in Wiltshire, possibly the world, called Whatley Manor.

Everything at Whatley Manor is per­fect. So spot-on are the replica extension buildings that house the spas and bars, that one wonders why the people who built the original house bothered at all, rather than just waiting till 2003 for it all to be done at once.

At every turn, new perfections caused me to gasp: the smooth segues of a new-laid flagstone floor, the turn of a mahogany banister, the depth of shine in an iron balustrade, the little Bose speakers in the ceiling corners, the tiny monogrammed jug for the warm milk that came with my espresso, even the gun-metal colour of the sky that so perfectly set off the yellow Cotswold stone… I swear, more thought had gone into the tassels on the ropes that held back the curtains than went into my whole house (though with their embroidered baubles and fringes clasp­ed in wooden woggles they looked, spookily, like a mass lynching of tiny cub scouts).

I ate in the brasserie, Le Mazot, because the Michelin-starred main restaurant is open only in the evenings, but they are served by the same kitchen. There was a ballotine of chicken and foie gras on honey-pickled carrots and reduced sweet soy sauce, which was perfect in every way except for being spelt “ballottine” on the menu and “ballontine” on my bill, which, in the context, were clangers of monstrous proportions. Nearly as big as the three giant bronze donkeys in the paddock by the stables.

Now, the double-baked Swiss soufflé I was less happy with, but not because it wasn’t perfect. It’s just that I was dreaming of the Rabelaisian fromage-fest you get with the soufflé suissesse at Le Gavroche, but received, instead, a sort of Honey I Shrunk the Soufflé! facsimile, no bigger than the palm of a toddler’s hand, resting on the two things I like least in the world – no, not tricky-to-reach pimples and Richard Littlejohn, but walnuts and celery. Euuuuuuchhh. It went neither with the brassy 2000 Stag’s Leap shiraz I had ordered, nor with the chill, grey Wiltshire afternoon.

The roast duck was overdone (for my taste) but full of flavour anyway, and a juicy square of pork belly with black pudding was served with the best mashed potato I have ever had – both gave the plonk a new lease of life. And if you’re passing within ten miles of here, stop off just to dip straw­berries and candied orange peel in the chocolate fondue. Your own chocolate fondue, obviously. You can’t just pop in and dip fruit into some other unsuspecting punter’s little pot. This is Wiltshire, you know.

Dinner that night, back at the Old Bell, showed that things don’t have to be perfect to be lovely. Grace and charm and a sense of continuity are just as good. Large tables of people far older than you would ever see on Saturday night in a London restaurant fill a vast burgundy room where treacly Victorian portraiture clunks with scary unframed modern abstracts and Futurist brass chandeliers. Staff whistle in and out of double kitchen doors half-concealed by a fabric screen that matches some of the other fabrics in the room, but not all of them. Late in the evening an errant curtain rail fell gracefully to the floor.

Young foreign waitresses try hard but seem permanently confused – while the suave head waiter is effortlessly efficient and makes decent jokes. An older fellow, grey haired and black suited, lends gravitas. He probably waited on Athelstan.

There was a jolly tomato soup pre-starter with a tapenade croûton and then an elegant little fishcake, very clean and unstodgy, with a light rösti crust and a dazzlingly green parsley sauce. A ballotine here, by comparison with Whatley Manor, contained ham rather than foie gras, and was appropriately rustic. A bottle of 1997 Château Musar, by way of even more instructive comparison, was £32.50 here, but £45 at Whatley.

Fish mains were not all they might have been, I have to say, but it never felt like the place to have fish. My fault. I was saving room for tomorrow’s mutton. But a bloody nice evening, again, in a bloody OK restaurant of the bloody perfectly OK English country house style against which I won’t hear a bloody word said.

So, yes, the mutton. The Priory Inn did look very much like the Crossroads Motel. And it was full of kids, but full, full, full. And they screamed like banshee divas warning deaf spectators at a speedway track of an impending air-raid. The waiter was lovely, the starters of hare terrine and parsnip soup were very nice (CAN YOU HEAR ME OK?) and the mutton, the mutton…

The mutton was just as you older folk, who remember it, knew it would be, and just as I, in my youthful fancy, dreamt it wouldn’t be. It was tough like the Artful Dodger’s hat and tasted faintly of rust. I’m still chewing it now.

The Old Bell

Abbey Row, Malmesbury, Wiltshire (01666 822344)

Meat/fish: 5

Cooking: 6

Charm: 9

Score: 7.33

Price: Four-course supper for two was £98.05 including a £27.30 bottle (service not included).