Ice Cream Dream

Sam Bullingham and Katie Bray make luxury ice creams at their Devon dairy… and it is seriously delicious. They talked to Andrei Szerard

- Andrei Szerard

It’s the end of a long hot afternoon and we’re in the affable company of Sam Bullingham and his partner Katie Bray, walking the fields of their smallholding, meeting the herd of beautiful Jersey cows and chatting about ethical animal husbandry. As we return to the farm buildings, Katie dives into the dairy and emerges a short time later carrying wafer cones stacked with scoops of freshly made ice cream. New flavours, she explains. Lemon meringue, chocolate brownie, Turkish delight and mint chocolate – what did we think? A few moments later we’re making noises of appreciation that cause their hens to become alarmed. Seriously delicious.

Sam and Katie are the founders and proprietors of Taw River Dairy – makers of luxury ice creams (and more besides) and they are immensely proud of what they have created in their corner of exquisitely pretty mid-Devon. They started the business from scratch and it’s taken a huge amount of hard work and boundless enthusiasm, but if our chicken-disturbing ice cream rapture is anything to go by, a very bright future lies ahead.

Although both have farming backgrounds, the move into ice cream making was not an obvious career path for either of them. Sam’s early memories involve visiting his grandparents’ hill farm on Dartmoor, helping to bottle-feed orphan lambs. An often-told story in the Bullingham family is of the infant Sam wandering through a flock of sheep and pointing out the best animals with the confidence of an old hill shepherd.