Feeling our way down unfamiliar lanes near Martock, we arrived at a dead end, with scarcely enough space to turn round, and high banks on either side. When a child's voice from behind a hedge asked us wearily if we were looking for the farm shop, it was clear that we were not the first to be stranded there. Following the voice's directions, we manoeuvred our way out of the cul de sac, found the shop, bought potatoes, apples and cider, and resumed our quest for a particular manor house.
We crept through little hamlets built of local stone lit to a warm gold by the sun, and then we found Wigborough, just a few dwellings close to the old Fosse Way. Again, our road came to an end, but this time it was blocked by a solid wooden gate. And there was the manor, tucked away in this sequestered spot, but noted as a particularly fine Elizabethan gabled mansion – though on a modest scale compared with a great Somerset house like Montacute. The gate opened as we approached, and we walked beside the curving wall of the kitchen garden to a big yard surrounded by barns and stables.
Ahead of us, and to our left and right, was nothing but a vast, uninterrupted expanse of mown grass stretching into the distance. We stood and wondered at its sheer scale until voices behind us, near the stables, made us look round. And there was a young couple, he dressed for riding and swishing a polo mallet with a practised air. A woman on a quad bike told us that the empty spaces were in fact three polo grounds. There had been matches played there that morning. And the villages in the hazy distance, below the blue hills, she told us, were Chiselborough (you could just make out the church spire) and Norton Sub Hamdon with its square tower.