There is an old hut up on a hill near the town of Honiton, not far from where we live in Devon. It’s our favourite place to go for family picnics, birthdays, celebrations, or just to be somewhere secret and sacred to us. The view is incredible. It looks out over the Devon countryside and on a sunny summer’s day you feel like the luckiest people on the planet to be somewhere so beautiful.

We’ve had many a celebration there, one of our most memorable being my other half’s birthday when around 15 of us walked up and had a huge winter’s picnic together. We took chairs, blankets, rugs, wine, and a big pot of stew and jacket potatoes.

How did we manage to keep it all warm you say? Well, I found an old ‘food warmer’ a couple of years ago at auction and it’s possibly one of the best things I’ve ever found. Described as a ‘cooking apparatus’, it was made in the late 1800’s and still works brilliantly. My other half’s birthday is in January, so to have walked a couple of miles up the hill with the stew packed in its cosy, wooden box and jacket potatoes wrapped in foil for us all to eat together was really quite special.

Image courtesy of Kal Ahmed on Flickr