Coates EnglishWillow

The Coate family has grown willow on the Levels at Stoke St Gregory since 1819 and made baskets since 1904, and the working business is open to watch: tours run through eighty-plus acres of withy beds and the yards where the rods are cut, boiled, stripped and woven. The visitor centre wraps it in a sculpture trail, paid basket-making workshops, a craft shop and the Lemon Tree café, and the same willow leaves the farm in every form the trade still takes — baskets, artists' charcoal, woven coffins. One of the last strongholds of a craft that once defined this wetland, run by the family that never stopped.