Welcome to Higher Rosevine Farm…
Just that little bit off the usual holiday trail, the Roseland Peninsula in south Cornwall is a place apart. Leave the A30, cross over the bridge at Tregony, and feel yourself relax. Fifteen minutes drive through beautiful, unspoilt countryside brings you to us.
We are David and Judy Painter, and we bought Higher Rosevine Farm in December 2019. David had a lifetime of twice yearly holidays in our village Portscatho, a tradition we continued when we were married and then when we had a family. Our children now have families of their own, but still continue have their holidays here, and in fact both our son and daughter were both married down here.
We were living in Kent, and early in 2019 we found ourselves in a position to make a change, although we weren’t quite sure what. We'd been toying with the idea of moving to the Roseland, but weren’t quite sure - our lives had been in the southeast, and it’s a big move to make. I guess you could say fate stepped in. We came down to Porthcurnick beach every holiday, and walking back up the lane we passed an attractive group of old stone barns built round a courtyard. “They’re so attractive, wouldn’t they be great as holiday cottages? They’ll never come on the market though" we used to say. Well… in 2019, we put our house in Kent on the market and thought we’d just explore properties on the Roseland. We contacted a local agent, and very quickly had a call to say there was a property we might be interested in - three barns, and planning to build a house on the site of an old dilapidated piggery. It was just up the lane from Porthcurnick beach… one week later, we’d put in an offer, and by December 2019, we had bought it, and were living down here in rented accommodation.
It turned out that the barns had already been run as holiday cottages, but for what we wanted to offer, considerable changes needed to be made, so in February 2020 the builders moved in - just a month before lockdown! Fortunately, the building trade were able to carry on working, and we had a great local team, who really came through for us and did a great job. The afternoon of July 11th, one day before lockdown ended, the builders left, and we were finally ready to accept guests. We were fully booked for the summer, and now have many returning guests who we love seeing, we’ve met lots of very interesting people.
It would be good to say that the rest is history, but we didn’t have a home, so there was the little matter of knocking down the piggery and building a house! Planning were happy with our revised plans, so in January 2021, we started the build. Again, our fantastic team of local builders pulled out all the stops, and by September that year we had moved in, nine months start to finish. It was stressful racing to finish before our rental agreement ended, especially for the builders, but they did it, and we were very grateful!
You could say now the rest is history, but we are constantly working to keep our cottages, looking great, and working on the gardens and surrounding land. We have a polytunnel where we are growing salads, veg and flowers for the cottages. We have planted many fruit trees, and we're adding more raised beds to increase our produce. Three years in and all still quite new at the moment, but an ongoing project that we’re thoroughly enjoying.
We have found ourselves in this beautiful part of the country and consider ourselves very lucky!
David & Judy