Fine Dining Footsteps from the Field: Farm to Fork Dining Experiences

Up a bumpy, hedgerow-trimmed track between rolling fields in the Pentland Hills lies Cockdurno Farm, one of the country’s coolest dining destinations. This 400-acre farm, on the edge of Edinburgh, was part of the Agricultural Department of Edinburgh University from the late 1800s, before being taken over by one of the lecturers, Professor Alick Buchanan-Smith. For the next 80 years his family ran it as a dairy farm – until falling milk prices caused the farm to falter financially. As with so many rural survival stories, diversification was the answer.

‘My brother Angus and I were meant to be fourth-generation dairy farmers,’ explains Charlie Buchanan-Smith, but in 2016 their father told them he would have to sell the farm. Charlie had experience working in kitchens, his brother front of house – and they had grown up around agriculture. ‘We realised there was a problem with our food system. We wanted to produce food sustainably and showcase it in a restaurant – joining the gap between production and consumption,’ Charlie continues. ‘That was how The Free Company started.’ After persuading their father not to sell, they began writing Cockdurno’s next chapter, converting it into a regenerative farm with seasonal, long-table suppers in what was once the old milking byre.