About The Old Workshop
The Owners
Thank you for taking the time to read about The Old Workshop. We are Alison and Andrew, we own The Old Workshop and live in the old farmhouse next door.
We have lived in Bath for twenty-five years, raised our sons here and they went to school in the city. Over these years we have loved getting to know Monkton Combe village, the Midford Valley and Bath. We have walked most of the footpaths, tried most of the good local pubs, and marked a quarter of a century of seasons in this valley.
We are happy to share our local experience with guests. The recommendations in the cottage and on this website — walks worth taking, places to eat, the best routes into the city — come from years of living here, not from a guidebook.
The Building
The Old Workshop is a stone building in the yard of a farmhouse whose timbers have been dendrochronologically dated to 1662 — the year the trees were felled. The farmhouse appears on Thomas Thorpe's 1742 An Actual Survey of the City of Bath, and of Five Miles Round — one of the most detailed cartographic records of the Georgian countryside around Bath.
The building that is now The Old Workshop was previously part workshop, part store, and in 2021–22 we converted it into a self-catering holiday cottage.
The Interior
The interior was designed by Alison, and the artwork on the walls is by local artists whose work draws on the natural world — blossom, feathers, landscape, light.
In the living area and downstairs bedroom are prints by Ruth Moser (@mcbeanandbudd), a Bath-based painter and textile designer whose work translates the colours and moods of the landscape onto both paper and fabric. In the stairway hangs a watercolour by Jilly Edwards (@_jillyedwards) — a preparatory painting for her tapestry Awake with the sun and see the reflections. Jilly is a Bath-based contemporary tapestry weaver whose career spans more than fifty years; her work is held in the permanent collection of the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester and has been exhibited at the Holburne Museum in Bath. In the living area, a cyanotype of feathers by local artist Sarah Stocken (@portwayprints) completes the collection — made by laying feathers on light-sensitive paper and exposing them to sunlight, making each of her pictures unique.
The Setting
The Old Workshop is in Monkton Combe, a small village in a quiet valley three miles south of Bath. The farmhouse next door has been here since at least 1662 and possibly much earlier. Monkton Combe School, one of the West Country's leading independent schools, is a five-minute walk away — we regularly welcome families visiting children at the school.
The valley has a rich history. The Somerset Coal Canal once passed through here on its way to join the Kennet and Avon Canal at Dundas Aqueduct, and stretches of its towpath are still walkable if you know where to look. The Two Tunnels Greenway, built on the old Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway, now brings walkers and cyclists through the valley. Monkton Combe's railway station — long gone, though a few traces survive in the landscape — provided the setting for the 1953 Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt.