Then & Now
Simon and Nicky bought Monks in 1998. When they first saw Monks, they couldn't go upstairs in the house, because the floor was collapsing. For the next three years Nicky made thousands of cups of tea for Steve Gallimore and his brilliant team as they worked to re-roof and repair the beautiful granite farm buildings.
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As the building team restored the farmhouse and barns, Nicky created the gardens.
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Designing and making a garden from scratch was the best fun and completely fascinating. We cleared brambles and nettles, old barbed wire and broken farm implements. Then it was time to rotovate and barrow out endless loads of manure from the farm buildings. Weeks of work before we could even begin to mark out the flower beds and seed the lawns. Finally we could plant hedges for shelter, trees for shade, and then roses and shrubs and bulbs to complete our "Heaven in a Garden."
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It wasn't until 2010, when our daughter Cressy got married at Monks Withecombe, that we thought of becoming a wedding venue. But after hearing "What a fantastic place for a wedding!" over and over again on that very happy day, the penny finally dropped. We looked around and realised that Monks really is "A fantastic place for a wedding!"