About Us
The farm specializes in growing Spelt, a nutritious and healthy ancient cousin of wheat, which it mills on the farm in a dedicated spelt mill ensuring no cross contamination - which is vital for those that are avoiding wheat or are wheat intolerant. They also rear rare breed animals which naturally help fertilise the land and nip the weeds!
The range includes spelt cereals, puffs, flour, biscuits, pearled spelt and “Speltottos”, a British risotto alternative.
The History of Sharpham Park
Sharpham Park is a 300 acre historic park close to Glastonbury in Somerset, which dates back to the Bronze Age. The first known reference to Sharpham Park is a grant by King Edwig to the thegn Aethelwold in 957. In 1191, Sharpham Park was conferred by the soon to be King John I to the Abbots of Glastonbury who remained in possession of the park and house until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, when the park was seized for the crown.
For the next 100 years it was the scene of a bitter battle for control between rival noblemen. From 1539 to 1707 the Park was owned by The Duke of Somerset, Sir Edward Seymour, brother of Queen Jane; Sir Edward Dwyer the Elizabethan post; the Thynne family of Longleat; the illustrious legal family of Sir Henry Gould and the famous novelist Henry Fielding who wrote Tom Jones and was born in 1707 at Sharpham Park. In the late 1700’s the Gould family failed to produce a male heir and the state passed to the Earl of Cavan through marriage. He in turn rented it to a succession of gentleman farmers, including the irascible Thomas Hawkins, a great palaeontologist who discovered the first fossils of the Icthyosaurus. In the 1830’s large parts of the original mansion were pulled down, including the chapel. In 1890 it was regarded as one of the best farms in Somerset, employing over 40 farm labourers with wheat, dairy, beef cattle and sheep.
Roger Saul, the founder of the British design label, Mulberry, and his wife Monty, now own the Park and have sympathetically restored and transformed it to its former glory. They have created the Sharpham Park food brand, born out of their passion for sustainably farmed, healthy and natural food. Sharpham Park is run as a profitable mixed economy park, tailored to today’s modern world. The main produce from the farm is spelt, an ancient form of wheat with great health benefits especially for those with a wheat intolerance, which is made into flour, bread, muesli, biscuits and pearled spelt. The farm also produces walnuts and a wide range of meat cuts, sausages and burgers from the rare breed White Park cattle, Red and Roe deer and Hebridean and Manx Loghtan sheep. The livestock, bred for their highly prized meats, is also raised to sustain the breeds.
The farming methods use the latest technology beside time honoured ways in an environmentally sensitive way, rotating the land as it always would have been, in order to offer food that we can be confident in and that we can be proud of.
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