Travel

Notes From One Woman’s Decade of Eating Scones


When Sarah Merker sat down one day in 2013 to snack on a scone at one of Britain’s many, many historic sites, she had no idea that she was embarking upon a quest that would take her a decade to complete and transform her into a kind of national celebrity.

She and her husband had just become dues-paying members of the National Trust, a conservation society that manages historic properties like castles and country manors across England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland’s are managed separately). The idea was to reward herself with scones for visiting and learning about the sites, and to write a blog that rated the history, and the baking, each on a five-point scale.

Her blog posts eventually formed the basis of “The National Trust Book of Scones,” a blend of recipes and her irreverent historical insights, published in 2017 just after Ms. Merker had eaten about 150 scones on location. And when Ms. Merker, 49, visited her 244th and final National Trust property this month, she made national headlines in a country that takes both its scones and its history quite seriously.

But there was a poignancy to the attention, too: she had lost her husband, Peter Merker, to cancer in 2018, leaving her to finish the quest without the partner she called her “Scone Sidekick.”

Lately, as she has been in the spotlight, she said it has felt as though he was back by her side.

“As anyone who has lost anyone will attest, you just want them back, even for a short time, and that’s what the media coverage and this project have given me,” she said. “That has been the most beautiful thing.”

“It rages,” Ms. Merker said of that debate with a laugh. “People are really very firm about which way they eat their scone. It’s kind of mad, in a way, because at the end of the day, it tastes the same whether you put cream or jam first. But it matters.”

This month, though, Ms. Merker revealed to journalists that she had always been jam-first — for practical reasons. Because the Cornish clotted cream that she normally eats tends to be gloopy, she said, applying it first would create a “right mess.”

Her husband, who worked in construction, agreed, of course.

“He was a builder,” she said of her Scone Sidekick. “He definitely wasn’t going to do anything that was going to make a mess.”



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