About 5 — Allaleigh House

Allaleigh House is a farmhouse in a hamlet in south Devon equidistant from Dartmouth, Kingsbridge and Totnes. It is the largest house, and was the largest holding, in the hamlet, the name of which has Anglo-Saxon origins – ‘Aella’s woodland clearing’. In its first documentary appearance, it was held of the Augustinian nunnery of Cornworthy Priory (founded 1205) for a quarter of a knight’s fee. The size of the hamlet steadily diminished during the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries as the cottages housing tannery workers fell into ruin – the tanning was supported by the oak woods in the valley leading from here towards Tuckenhay on a creek of the River Dart. Its population is now on the up thanks to conversion of hitherto redundant farm buildings, as well as to the arrival of the off-grid settlement or community known as Landmatters. The house itself may be of ancient origin (the celebrated Devon historian W.G. Hoskins maintained that it was the ancestral holding of John Hawley, the original of the ‘shipman of Dartmouth’ in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), but what you see today is the result of an extensive makeover in 1840, just before the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845, when farmers’ incomes were at an all-time high thanks to strict protectionism. Although there has been much rearrangement of ownership in the last few years, Allaleigh House has a smallholding of forty acres maintaining a small flock of sheep (mainly of the Manx Loaghtan breed) as well as some pigs. We have lived here for the past forty years.

Photograph courtesy of Toby Coulson

Tom Jaine is an erstwhile archivist, restaurateur, author and editor, and publisher. His first jobs were with the Northamptonshire Records Office and thereafter with the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. Having been raised in the restaurant business (his stepfather was George Perry-Smith of the Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath), he went into partnership with Perry-Smith, Heather Crosbie and Joyce Molyneux after they had sold the Bath enterprise in 1972. The result, for him, was the establishment of the Carved Angel restaurant in Dartmouth together with the chef Joyce Molyneux in 1974. This lasted until 1984 after he moved to Allaleigh and began to explore a life of writing. He had started a monthly newsletter on food matters, called Twelve Times a Year, in 1980, which continued, under various titles, through much of the ’80s. He wrote a couple of recipe books, then edited the Good Food Guide from 1989 to 1994. In 1993, he bought the imprint Prospect Books from its founders Alan and Jane Davidson and continued to publish books about food history and cookery from his base at Allaleigh until selling the business to its present owner, Catheryn Kilgarriff, in 2014. In the year 2000, he also took on Alan Davidson’s small journal of food history, Petits Propos Culinaires, which he continued to edit until 2023. In 2006, he edited the second edition of Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, and in 2014, he edited the third edition. When not dealing with words and books, some time has also been spent, since the mid-’80s, on baking bread, not least in the wood-fired oven he constructed at Allaleigh. This resulted in the only books he has written that have ever sold more than 500 copies: Building a Wood-fired Oven (Prospect Books, 1996) and Making Bread at Home (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998). On occasion, he has received the odd award: Glenfiddich Restaurant Writer of the year in 1994, Glenfiddich Food Broadcaster of the year in 2000, and that same year he was also the winner of the top award: Glenfiddich Trophy for the best Wine and Food Writer of the year. Some years later he was proud to receive the BBC Food Programme’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Tom Jaine driving Susan the pig, encouraged by Sally and faithful hound.

Tom Jaine selling books in France.