LIQUORICE, Dubonnet, and farmyard slurry form an improbable trio. But there is a pleasing logic behind the circumstances that have brought this unlikely triumvirate from a farm in Sturminster Marshall to the tables of Gary Rhodes’ new Christchurch restaurant in the guise of flavours from a range of award winning ice cream.

Cow to Cone is the culmination of two years of hard work from Chris and Wendy Pope, dairy farmers who, faced with low milk prices and a need to diversify, have successfully combined the seemingly disparate assets of 200 Holstein cows and the idyllic surrounds of a National Trust farmhouse to produce high quality ice cream for which people travel from miles around to enjoy in their tranquil gardens on the Kingston Lacy estate.

But while the acre of farmhouse garden, set in an area officially designated one of outstanding natural beauty, and charmingly divided by box-hedge into a child’s hide-and-seek paradise, is perhaps the best place to enjoy Barford Farmhouse ice cream, it is not the only one.

An expanding client list of hotels, restaurants, and small farm shops across Dorset has become an increasingly voracious consumer of Chris and Wendy’s ice cream, with more than 80 per cent of their output delivered to culinary beacons from Shapwick to the New Forest, including Kingston Lacy House. The small scale, hands-on nature of the production process allows the couple to respond with bespoke creations to the gastronomic impulses of chefs specialising in cuisines as diverse as Indian and French. Basil ice cream for Les Mirabelles in the New Forest, and beetroot sorbet for the Lord Bute in Christchurch, are among the pair’s one-off creations.

Selection by one of the nation’s best known chefs is the latest in a growing list of endorsements. A meeting with Gary Rhodes (“very pleasant, an easy chap to get along with”) has been followed by success at one of the region’s best established agricultural shows. Entries in the 131st Frome Cheese Show saw Barford Farmhouse ice cream sweep the board. With a permitted maximum of three entries, the couple’s ginger, Dorset honey, and chocolate ice creams took first, second, and third places respectively. The ginger ice cream went on to be judged the best non-cheese product in the entire show.

In a world in which the nice guy rarely wins, it is refreshing to see a hard working family unit justly rewarded for their efforts. The Popes followed Chris’ father from a 200-acre holding at Colehill to the 600-acre, mixed dairy and arable farm in Sturminster Marshall when the National Trust tenancy became vacant in 1987. A year later, with the retirement of Mr Pope senior, the couple took over the six-bedroom, red brick farmhouse, and remodelled the garden as one from the pages of a children’s story book. Son, William, 28, “pretty much runs the farm,” according to his mother, while the visits of his wife, Joanna, and their children, two-year-old Georgina, and new baby Harry, provide the hardworking grandparents with an excuse to enjoy a rare moment of relaxation in their own garden. Wendy explains that the flat, manicured area of grass to the left of the house is a tennis court, before adding ruefully that, “no one has time to play tennis.”

Among the more idiosyncratic applications to pass through the planning department at East Dorset District Council must be Chris and Wendy’s request to convert a double garage to an ice cream parlour. In keeping with the farm’s bucolic surroundings, the garage is not the ugly brick box of the suburban housing estate, but rather a wooden structure with a pitched slate roof, in which the up-and-over entrance has been replaced with a small doorway and window, giving it the even-featured appearance of a child’s drawing. Picture a large wendy house, or a miniature chalet. The parlour stands in the grounds of the house, next to a shed from which visitors to the garden purchase their frozen delicacies.

The interior is more science lab than farmhouse kitchen. White washed walls and spotless equipment create a clinical ambience that underscores a serious approach to a fun product. The couple’s insistence on quality (“We don’t use dry skimmed milk powder and whip it full of air”) is borne out in the high-tech tools of their trade. Home grown, or locally sourced ingredients (their own milk and butter, honey from Hurn, eggs from Somerset,) are prepared in stainless steel beakers, boiled in a giant pasteurising machine (84 degrees for ice cream, 73 degrees for sorbet) and thickened by the blades of an ice cream making machine, before being disgorged into the farm’s branded pots (and indolent Friesian framed by Kingston Lacy colours) and transferred to two walk-in freezers across the yard for storage at temperatures as low as minus twelve degrees.

The proximity of the ice cream parlour to the dairy yard (mere feet, but separated by a low wall marking the boundary between working farm and visitors’ haven) is the inspiration behind the company’s name. The couple joke of the “one hour challenge” in which a single, nine-litre batch of ice cream is produced within sixty minutes of milking. “We think its possible to go from cow to cone in under an hour,” says Wendy. “It’s supposition at the moment, not fact,” adds Chris, “but one day we’ll get around to proving it.”

Membership of organisations as diverse as LEAF (Linking Environment And Farming) and Direct from Dorset (a trading standards-backed initiative to promote local enterprise) is further evidence of a small, family business maintaining its ethics and succeeding on its own terms. The contrast in quality between Cow to Cone ice cream and its mass-produced, air filled competition is matched only by the difference in the surroundings in which it is enjoyed. A subject to muse upon, perhaps, while enjoying a liquorice ice cream beneath the farmhouse garden’s weeping willow, far from the supermarket’s madding crowd.