Family Trees with Matt Best

Matt and Frida Best are the fourth generation (their teenage children are the fifth) to live and work on Hincknowle Farm. His great grandparents – Jim and Molly – came to the farm in 1923, although they each had family roots reaching back to other parts of Dorset before then.

Although there were already some orchards at Hincknowle when his great-grandparents arrived on the farm, they planted more from the mid-1920s onwards. Muddicombes is the last remaining complete orchard at Hincknowle planted by Jim and Molly, which they began in 1938 – Matt still has a map from 1943 with the different apple varieties marked on it. The orchard name came from the original field, which was called Muddicombes: from Old English ‘mudde’ and ‘combe’, meaning ‘muddy valley’. Having visited myself in early winter, it is well-named: very muddy, and also steeply sloping. It seems odd – and hard work – to have an orchard on such difficult ground. But Matt explains that before mechanisation, when all the orchard work (including picking apples) was done by hand, then it made sense to plant an orchard on a part of the farm that couldn’t be used for growing crops or anything else. Matt remembers picking in the orchard when he was eighteen years old: “I was there on my hands and knees with a basket. Going up the side of the hillside. That was the last time it was sort of properly harvested. Now it’s just picked by family and friends and mostly for apple juice rather than cider, because we’ve got kids who like to drink it…”

In the beginning Hincknowle was a mixed farm, arable and animals, including pedigree Devon cattle. Jim Best first formed a cider-making business along with two other local growers. They called their cider Linden Lea, after the beautiful orchard-themed poem of the same title by William Barnes, known as the ‘Dorset Poet’ [see below]. At this stage the old cobb and thatch house was rather worse for wear: “there were stinging nettles growing on the first-floor landing, and bracket fungus growing out of the walls – large enough to hold a cider pot!” Jim and Molly spent a lot of time and energy doing things up. They had six children, and the younger four were all born in the house – in the same bedroom that Matt and Frida now have. 

Fast-forward a decade or two, and the next generation.  In the 1970s many landowners were being economically encouraged to grub out old orchards, possibly influenced by the newly-formed EEC. Matt’s grandfather, Tom Best, after retiring from the navy (as Rear Admiral), was approached by the director of Taunton Cider. He and several other recently retired military men were then contracted to grow cider apples to fulfil the needs of Taunton Cider. It helped expand the apple orchard coverage of Hincknowle Farm, as well as others in the West Dorset area – such as Isaac’s in Beaminster, and Dorset Nectar in Waytown. 

Matt remembers visiting the farm, where he would eventually live and work himself. “As a child, I spent a lot of time here with my grandparents, getting to know the lie of the land.” After his grandfather died, his grandmother stayed in the main house until she was around eighty years old. Then, in 1990 the house somehow caught fire. Matt’s uncle looked out from his own neighbouring house one day to see billowing smoke, then ran down shouting “Mum your house is on fire!” Many neighbours from Melplash village still remember the event, including helping to clear the house of his mother’s belongings.

After a career as a submarine commander in the Royal Navy, Matt’s father, Rupert Best, helped to convert Portland naval base into a commercial port. At the same time, he took over the running of Hincknowle Farm, continuing to grow cider apples under contract, and becoming a prominent champion of Dorset apples and cider…

Just over 20 years ago, pomologist Liz Copas (from Long Ashton research station) and cider-maker Nick Poole from West Milton began a personal passion-project to research and recreate cider from indigenous Dorset apple varieties – grown nowhere else in the country. They scoured the countryside from village to village and discovered many previously forgotten and unknown varieties from farm orchards, overgrown gardens, and old hedgerows. These apples were given new names that often reflected their geographical origins: Symes Seedling, Hunters Ground, Lancombe, Marnhull Mill, Dorset Winter Stubbard, Golly Knapp, Matravers, Puddletown, Frome River, Marlpits, Meadow Cottage.  Although others have more imaginative and evocative names such as: Ironsides, Best Bearer, Tangy, Golden Ball, Kings Favourite, Yaffle, and Dewbit (the latter being Dorset vernacular for an early morning bite of food).

Liz and Nick took cuttings from each of these venerable and endangered trees and then grafted them onto commercial rootstocks. Eventually, after several years, they were able to pick fruit and make cider from around 20 of these varieties. Eventually they held a taste-testing for these re-discovered varieties at Hincknowle Barn hosted by Rupert Best. Before he died in 2021, Rupert established a mother orchard for these new Dorset apple varieties, which he named Linden Lea; continuing a family tradition. Matt now hopes that as the veteran Muddicombes orchard is sensitively restored and managed through the Brit Valley Project, he can use scions from Linden Lea to replant it, keeping the ‘family trees’ thriving into the future: 

“Ideally, we would like to start replacing where we've had trees falling in here. We'd like to restock with Dorset apple tree varieties, including Cattistock Pink. Whether it makes a good cider or not, I don't know, but it's the most beautiful tree…” Matt shares photos of the Cattistock Pink apple variety, which not only has shocking pink flowers, but also vibrant rosy stains within the flesh of the fruit itself.

At the same time as restocking the orchard, Matt recognises the value of not doing too much tidying up, from an ecological point of view. Allowing the ‘messiness’ of nature is something that several partners within the project have come to recognise and value. For instance, some of the fallen veteran apple trees will host a plethora of wildlife as a kind of rotting resource. He plans to leave the fallen ones in place, plant some others and then introduce low-level livestock grazing to help manage the bracken and brambles. Longer term, he’s even hoping to create some wildflower and herb pasture beneath the trees, partly so that the animals can self-medicate on the right plants – something project officer Nick Gray is also passionate about. Like many partners in the project, Matt is more than happy to take it slowly and see how things develop as nature also plays its unpredictable part.

These days, much of the farm is planted with commercial apple trees, on more accessible fields. He tells me that Muddicombes was last harvested for cider production in 1992. And he recognises the wide-ranging value of having Muddicombes as a veteran orchard on the farm. “I think it’s really to hold on to a historic orchard and to have everything within that environment that goes with it.” When I visit Muddicombes in late autumn it is a magical place of steep slopes, and ancient angular apple trees, some almost horizontal. Amongst the long grass and golden bracken are little pools of fallen apples, yellow and crimson in the glinting winter sunshine. The air is filled with a sweet and heady mix of wild cider as the apples slowly ferment. Such old orchards are recognised as having important wildlife value, not least as a feeding resource for birds. Matt is enthusiastic in describing his orchards brimming with migrant birds in winter:

“In December, you think of an orchard as being empty. But then you find that it's just full of noise and life. We get lots of thrushes: some Redwings but especially all these fantastic Fieldfares. You can hear them in their thousands and it sounds like you're in a sort of a tropical forest, the amount of noise they make. Then when you move, the whole canopy lifts up and flies away…

Also, what's quite funny, is that Frida’s mother lives in Helsinki. And in in the summer, if you go to Helsinki, you can see Fieldfares, possibly they are the same ones that come here to the orchards in winter.”

Even the name of the farm reflects this ongoing ornithological richness. Hincknowle originates from Old English words henn and knoll, and translates as: “hill frequented by wild birds”.

As I leave the farm, the road back towards Melplash village becomes a steep-sided holloway, a distinctive and deeply-worn sunken lane. It is one of many holloways in this area of Dorset, which are now recognised as important landscape features themselves. But this one has a unique site-specific benefit: with an apple orchard above it forms a natural setting for a hopper, so that the harvested apples can be easily loaded into a lorry parked below in the holloway. It’s another example of the theme of the orchard: the reciprocity between human heritage and nature’s diversity. 

Linden Lea by William Barnes

Within the woodland's flowery gladed

By the oak tree's mossy moot

The shining grass-blades, timber-shaded

Now do quiver under foot

And birds do whistle overhead

And water's bubbling in its bed

And there for me the apple-tree

Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

When leaves that lately were a-springing

Now do fade within the copse

And painted birds do hush their singing

Up upon the timber tops

And brown-leaved fruits turning red

In cloudless sunshine overhead

Will fruit for me the apple-tree

Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

Let other folk make money faster

In the air of dark-roomed towns

I don't dread a peevish master

Though no man may heed my frowns

I be free to go abroad

Or take again my homeward road

To where for me the apple-tree

Do lean down low in Linden Lea.