It has felt like a long time to be deprived of the richness and fulfilment travel brings - exploring new places, spending a night at your favourite hotel, unwinding in a spa, or enjoying an afternoon tea in a beautiful garden. While we might have forgotten how good this all feels, our desire to travel has not been lost. This issue is all about health, wellness and meaningful travel – ‘slow travel’ (as it has recently been dubbed). So, if you’re looking for an unforgettable trip, to be enjoyed at your own pace, then we hope you will find plenty of inspiration within our summer features. Our top ten life-affirming Health Breaks, are guaranteed to reboot the body and mind, while our Best Tall Ship and Sailing Adventures, offer the ultimate active escapism. The brand-new collection curated National Trust experiences, are not to be missed, and our Top Eco-Attractions, showcase the very best of our natural world. Wishing you safe and magical, extraordinary summer of staycations!
The company, founded in
The company, founded in 2013, puts a lot of effort into nurturing their natural raw material. “Gosnells’ postcode meads do demonstrate the trees, bushes and flowers in different areas of London and its surrounds. They are massively different from each other,” says Tom. “There is no added sugar (as in Champagne), and no need for balancing acids (as in wine), but mead is reliant on our populations of bees – so we are working on providing them with nectar all through the year.” To this end, the company has recently opened a ‘mead garden’, with pollinating plants recommended by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and London apiarists, and educational materials for visitors to help them be kind to pollinators. Embracing modern ways of reaching its market, the company holds monthly online tastings. 22 BritishTravelJournal.com
And if mead strikes you as relatively expensive, consider the incredible industry required to produce its main ingredient. Mead is around three parts water to one part honey, and a bee needs to gather nectar from two million flowers to make one pound of honey. To reach all those flowers, she flies 90,000 miles, three times round the world. On cost, Rod cautions: “If you can buy a bottle of mead for under a tenner it is almost definitely a pyment, ie mixed with grape juice – a far cheaper commodity than honey.” As a man who knows his mead, Rod rates the following producers, as well as Gosnells. Baldur Mead by the Lancashire Mead Company (lancashiremeadcompany.co.uk), fermented out to dryness in the traditional manner. In the Scottish Highlands Christopher Mullins, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, at The Rookery Craft Mead (rookery.scot), fashions clean, natural and complex flavours from foraged ingredients including spruce, silver birch, crab apple, plum, sloe, lavender, pear, mint and ginger, creating seasonal ‘midwinter’ and ‘midsummer’ brews, and even sells Viking-style drinking horns. In Cornwall there’s Ninemaidens “ If you can buy a bottle of mead for under a tenner it is almost definitely a pyment, ie mixed with grape juice – a far cheaper commodity than honey ” Mead (ninemaidensmead.co.uk) with fruit, spiced and 40% distilled options. In Wales there’s Mountain Mead (mountainmead.co.uk), who suggest mixing mead with tonic or making a meady Kir royale by topping up their Telor y Coed medium-sweet mead with Champagne, and Wye Valley Meadery (wyevalleymeadery.co.uk), who apply modern brewing techniques to the most ancient beverage. In Rod’s opinion, the best examples of traditional mead are Dr Hugh Howard Tripp’s Pennard Vineyard Mead (12%; pennardorganicwines.co.uk/shop.asp) from Somerset, and Christopher Mullins’s Rookery Mead (17%), with the best liqueur mead “by far” Beeble (30%; beeble.buzz) from North Wiltshire made by Ellie Berry (beekeeper) and Matthew Brauer (bookkeeper) and fortified with fine Scotch whisky. Whether it’s a traditional true mead, or one with a 21st-century twist, mead is creating a bit of a buzz…. BritishTravelJournal.com 23
