This is the home of Hidden Valley Pigs, the happiest, friendliest little smallholding in the universe.

From here you'll be able to:

• Check out what meat is available and order gorgeous food parcels to be delivered right to your door, anywhere in the country.
• Find a course on, Smallholding, Pig Butchery and Processing or Self Sufficiency.
• Contact Simon Dawson, freelance writer and newspaper columnist, author of The Self Sufficiency Bible and 'The Self Sufficiency Guru' on BBC Radio Devon.
• Contact Debbie Dawson, TV's Local Food Hero for the South West, and the biggest food brain in the world!

Or of course, you can just hang out with us...

If you close your eyes and imagine an old fashioned smallholding of something like the 1900s, this would be it.

We have no electricity, no mains water (all the animals drink water collected directly from the West Lyn river, pure and natural and filtered across Exmoor).

The pigs spend their days mooching about in the woods along side the chickens, the goats and wild red deer.

If the pigs want to root in the earth between the trees for grubs and bugs, they do.  If they want to play, they do.  If they want a little 'me' time on their own for a while, they can.  If they want to laze about in a mud wallow cooling down, they do.  it's their choice.

And that's the point.  It is their choice.

All our animals are wild-range (the stage beyond free-range where they just seem to please themselves), and include:

• Pigs and piglets, including our 50 stone boar the General Lee, and six breeding sows, together with their offspring.
• Sheep and lambs
• Hand-milking goats, Amber and Bee
• Two hooligan Geese
• Dex, the gorgeous one eye'd sheep dog
• Darcy, the mummy's-boy Great Dane
• Georgie and Alfie, two stunning horses
• Ducks
• Chickens (numbers vary between 50 & 100) both meat and layers
• Niko and Morris, two feral cats
• Horrendously happy turkeys

What do we do?  In addition to running the smallholding, running courses and selling produce at county fairs and farmers' markets...

• We're self sufficient in just about everything
• We rear, butcher and process all our own meat
• Cure bacon, ham and chorizo, make our own sausages
• Grow vegetables, fruit and salad
• Forage for goodies
• Make our own dairy produce from our own goat's milk; yogurt, cheese, ice-cream, even butter
• Bake bread and cakes and pies
• Brew beer, wine and flavour yummy drinks
• Cut and split all our own wood for the fire (the only source of heating in the house)
• Look after the animals
• Write for magazines, newspapers and books
• Occasional TV appearances and lots of live radio

All our food and produce are fresh and home-made, using natural ingredients and are additive free!

(Well some of us work!)

All our courses are individual - we never mix groups!

• Half day course
• One day course
• Two day course

Forget classrooms (we all had enough of those at school), when you book a course, you book us, our home, our land and all the animals.  We are yours, and we can fill your time doing what you want to do. 

Our courses are professional, personal and well organised so you get the most out of your time.  Choose between, or a combination of:

• Butchery and processing an entire pig, learning how to use every part nose to tail.  Hands on, you will make a cutting plan, butcher under tutelage of our master butcher, learning all the butcher's cuts, hints tips and secrets along the way.  Then make your own sausages, bacon, brawn, chorizo, faggots, all from scratch without a packet or additive in sight!
• Smallholding.  Get a feel for the animals by spending time with them, feeding, watering and bedding down.  Learn about their houses, their likes and dislikes, their moods and their habits.  Learn to inject a pig, shear or dag a sheep, cut the flight feathers on a chicken and milk a goat.
• Stripped down Self Sufficiency.  This is about being creative and putting food on the table, food cooked from scratch using fresh, seasonal, local produce without a packet or an additive anywhere to be seen.  But most important, it's about using simple, stripped down methods and recipes with all the flaf taken out!  Mrs Beeton for the 21st Century.

Please contact us for course date enquires