stay 11 Ice cream, golf and goats by RICHARD MOLLOY
Not following the herd: Sarah and Simon say the pygmy goats were an impulse purchase
What do you do if you fancy uprooting from a city for a lifestyle change? Well, if you’re anything like Sarah and Simon Colquhoon then it might involve saving a rural pub from the clutches of private residency and creating a holiday playground. Six years ago, The Gaggle of Geese at Buckland Newton in rural Dorset was closed and crumbling; and Simon and Sally were running a leasehold pub in Brighton and looking for a change of life for themselves and their young son. After a few failed incarnations and an all-too-familiar attempt by a previous owner to convert it into private housing – mercifully thwarted by residents and the local parish council – The Gaggle lay empty amid its five acres of land… until the Colquhoons got wind of it. “We could see there was real potential
there,” Simon told us. But it wasn’t just the potential of the pub itself that attracted the family. They had one eye (or three) firmly on the adjacent land. “The pub took us about 10 months to refurb, but we saw that the land and garden could be something really special that might be the key to making the pub viable,” says Simon. This potential had gone largely overlooked by previous operators and, aside from occasional use by the Caravan Club, had been unused as a source of revenue, but
