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From The Sunday Times
March 30, 2008
Britain's 20 best holiday cottages
It’s not good enough just to have a gorgeous chintz-free pad in a pristine location. There has to be something extra
Would you like to be very, very thrilled with yourself about your choice of holiday this year? Turns out it’s easy. First, you get all eco-superior over the fact that you care about the planet’s future, and so would rather blow cigarette smoke in a baby’s face than take one of those evil flight things to that abroad place.
Then you have a look at what’s available in the UK – and that’s when the real hop-and-skip warm glow of smugness envelops you. Because, while we’ve all been desperate to leave these shores for a “proper” holiday, Britain has changed.
There are now fabulous self-catering options, from cute cabins with private beaches to stately piles with rooftop hot tubs, that are stylish and affordable, and come without the lose-the-will-to-live queues and irritatingly whimsical security restrictions of our delightful airports... Perfect.
THE ATTENBOROUGH OPTION
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We bow to the gutsiness of BBC wildlife camera crews who suffer untold privations to bring us rare footage of pygmy hippos and flying lizards, but we’re talking holiday rather than hardship, so this trio of inglenooked cottages in wild and woolly Northumberland, and a cup of cocoa, will do nicely for us, thank you. Infrared cameras in badger, barn-owl and fox habitats are dotted throughout the conservation farm’s 60 acres, and link direct to your widescreen television for a gripping alternative to the pond life in EastEnders.
Wow factor: live nature cams.
Details: 01830 520530, www.whiteleeholiday
cottages.com; cottages sleep 4-5; from £55pp for a week.
A COTTAGE ON THE GREEN
Some dispute its status as a sport, because players don’t run, jump or shoot, they just have to wear clothes in clashing Day-Glo colours. If golf is your game, however, bag one of the three traditionally cute Idehill cottages – not because they’re tucked into 50 prime acres of east Devon, within a seagull’s swoop of great seaside resorts such as Beer and Branscombe, but because they have their own 18-hole course. It’s not Wentworth, but, erm, you’re not Tiger.
Wow factor: exclusive use of a golf course.
Details: 01548 853089, www.toadhallcottages.co.uk; cottages sleep 4-6; from £99pp for a week.
BY ROYAL APPOINTMENT
The Balmoral Estate, in Royal Deeside, is the Queen’s favourite retreat – and, when Liz isn’t staying, you can. The estate rents out six properties, from the humble Colt Cottages, close to the castle, with more than a whiff of Formica, to the grander Alltnaguibhsaich Lodge, which lies at the head of Glen Muick and where sporrans would blend into the background nicely. Wherever you lay your headscarf, the stunning Caledonian country, teeming with red squirrels, golden eagles and mist-covered munros, is just as nice without a title. For fans of Her Majesty, this beats a Queen Mum commemorative tea towel hands down.
Wow factor: you’re staying in the royal family’s favourite holiday home.
Details: 013397 42534, www.balmoralcastle.com; cottages sleep 5-13; from £63pp for a week.
CHESHIRE’S BIG CHEESE
Lymm is one of the Britain’s poshest villages, and the Tower House is a suitably stylish address. After an eight-year labour-of-love renovation, this Victorian water tower now has a wraparound glass extension featuring a lounge with a dramatic suspended fireplace, Lefroy Brooks bathrooms, a sophisticated lighting system (the designer also worked on Tate Modern), a Poggenpohl kitchen and a rooftop garden with a hot tub and surround sound – all of which should leave you grinning like a Cheshire cat.
Wow factor: the building was a finalist in the 2006 Grand Designs awards.
Details: 01637 881942, www.uniquehomestays.com; sleeps 10; from £350pp for a week.
FOR ORLA KIELY WELLY-WEARERS
If you want something that deposits a bit more dirt under your french-manicured nails than a country cottage can provide, but draw the line at air beds and communal toilet blocks, Feather Down Farm Days is your glamping option. A cross between a tent and a two-up, two-down, it has equipped kitchens, proper beds and proper sinks, but a canvas roof, so you can feel eco-smug. There are 16 dotted about the UK, each based on a small working farm. Gather eggs from the henhouse, cook food grown on the farm, bake bread in a wood-fired oven. By bedtime, you’ll have earned the right to a chorus of Waltons-style “ ’night, John-Boy”s.
Wow factor: ensuite flushing loos – they may not sound special now... but wait until 3am.
Details: 01420 80804, www.featherdown.co.uk; sleeps 6; from £57pp for a week.
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
For the hell-is-other-people existentialist, the solution is a private island. Torsa, 16 miles south of Oban, on Scotland’s rugged west coast, is 250 acres of heaven. There is only one property on the island, a sunny farmhouse that comes with three bedrooms, two barns and one ivy-clad medieval castle. Company is limited to otters catching crabs on the shore, dolphins playing in the sheltered waters of Ardnamir Bay and skylarks overhead. You simply can’t fall out with the neighbours.
Wow factor: your very own kingdom.
Details: 01852 314274, www.torsa-island.co.uk; sleeps 5; from £135pp for a week.
NET GAINS
It’s the UK’s most popular participation sport – we’re talking fishing. St Cuthberts Farmhouse nestles into 600 perfectly positioned acres for catching salmon. The River Tweed is almost within casting distance, Berwick-upon-Tweed a 10-mile drive; and, while the wearing of tweed is purely optional, it accessorises nicely with the Victorian house’s classic country decor. You can get a beat for just £20, but the ardent angler spends as much as £350 to perch on this riverbank.
Wow factor: five minutes’ stroll from the world’s most famous salmon river.
Details: 020 7223 0233, www.stcuthbertsfarmhouse.co.uk; sleeps 10; from £120pp for a week.
LAKE DISTRICT VIA THE COTSWOLDS
Bask in Scandinavian pine-scented purity in the unlikely setting of sleepy old Cirencester. These two Finnish log cabins snuggle into the tree-dappled shoreline of a 100-acre, spring-fed private lake and come with a rowing skiff for expeditions to its network of islands and beaches. Spot kingfishers, nightingales and even, occasionally, sunshine, then toast your toes and marshmallows on your cabin’s wood-burning stove. It’s Ikea with knobs on.
Wow factor: your own lake.
Details: 01285 770082, www.loghouseholidays.co.uk; Island Lodge (sleeps four) from £155pp for a week, Moondara (sleeps eight) from £112pp for a week.
PAMPERED PRINCESSES
You know the old home-from-home cliché? Would that it were true of this ivy-clad courtyard of quaintly old-fashioned cottages, just outside Chipping Norton. The reality is the Hon Judy Astor’s Bruern Holiday Cottages, with Farrow & Ball paints, Nina Campbell scatter cushions and Smallbone kitchens, are drawn from a swankier swatch than most household budgets can run to. Happily, that doesn’t mean small people with endless uses for a half-eaten rusk are banned. The complex is child-friendly, with a two-storey Wendy house in the walled garden and 1920s-style pedal cars for bombing around its stunning gardens, so mothers can lie back and think of their next beauty treatment.
Wow factor: a five-star spa, featuring supertrendy Aromatherapy Associates lotions and potions, a mintily delicious pool and gym.
Details: www.bruern-holiday-cottages.co.uk; 12 cottages, sleeping 2-10, from £370pp for a week.
DOWN IN THE WOODS
There’s something magical and tranquil about late nights in the forest – so long as there are no Scouts about. And if you go down to these particular woods (Keldy, in the North York Moors national park; Trossachs national park, in Scotland; and Deerpark, in Cornwall), you’ll find swanky designer log cabins with floor-to-ceiling windows in the living rooms and all mod cons, including widescreen televisions and even wider verandas with private hot tubs.
Wow factor: each site plans to open a one-bedroom tree house in July, reached by an adventurers’ bridge.
Details: 0845 130 8223, www.forestholidays.co.uk; Evergreen cabins, which sleep 4-8, start at £50pp for a week. The treehouses cost £60 per night and can be booked in conjunction with a Silver Birch or Golden Oak cabin, sleeping 4-6; from £81pp for a week.
A WRITER’S RETREAT
Geoffrey Chaucer spent 13 years writing The Canterbury Tales, and the current owners of the Norfolk farm near Holt that the poet bought for his son spent even longer renovating its barn. After 15 years’ endeavour, however, the conversion is fit for even the most demanding pilgrim. The rooms feature exposed brick, oak ceilings and stone floors, and the building’s height is exploited in a cathedral-like main living space, while the introduction of maximum-impact windows brings the barn’s five acres of gardens, rolling fields and woodland indoors, to spectacular effect.
Wow factor: you’re on an 80-acre farm once owned by Chaucer.
Details: 01386 701177, www.ruralretreats.co.uk; sleeps 18; from £219pp for a week.
WELSH WATERWORLD
Loved-up couples may despise the very idea of a leisure village, but, post-pitter-patter of tiny feet, priorities change. Enter Bluestone, which opens within the Pembrokeshire Coast national park in July, and has 233 smart, eco-friendly lodges and cottages, its own spa, restaurants, shops, a gastropub and dozens of distractions for junior, from craft tips to canoe trips. Some parents might even get to finish those books they started ... in 2006.
Wow factor: exclusive sessions at the Blue Lagoon all-weather water park, next door, which will have the UK’s largest indoor boogie wave when it opens in June.
Details: 01834 862400, www.bluestonewales.com; two-bedroom lodges from £230pp for a week.
CALENDAR STAR
The problem with townies in search of the rural idyll is that many tend to panic when there are no street lights and the local shopkeeper has never heard of squid-ink pasta, so Updown Cottage is the perfect compromise. It is cute, beamed and Aga’d up, with eyefuls of lush, rolling countryside through every window, but it’s tucked amid the cobbles of the busy hilltop town of Shaftesbury, in Dorset, and only a stone’s throw away from a deli selling gourmet goodies. No need to pack those Maldon smelling salts, then.
Wow factor: it’s on Gold Hill – aka the Hovis hill in Ridley Scott’s iconic television ad, and probably the most photographed incline in the UK.
Details: 07710 307202, www.updowncottage.co.uk; sleeps 6; from £116pp for a week.
A STARRY BEACH
Some of the acting may be more wooden than the bleached floorboards in these chic retreats, but Echo Beach is proving a ratings success for ITV. The Waves apartments, which were home to Martine McCutcheon and Jason Donovan during filming, overlook the show’s real draw – the three miles of Watergate Bay that provide its stylish backdrop. If you don’t want to make use of the swanky kitchens, dine across the road at the Cornish branch of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant.
Wow factor: overlooks the bay used in Echo Beach.
Details: 01637 861005, www.beachretreats.co.uk; apartments sleep 4-6; from £88pp for a week.
ROVER CAN COME TOO
The Caban Casita is even more 1970s than a Space Hopper. Tucked into a shady glade on the Pembrokeshire/Carmarthenshire borders, the eco-cabin has lots of furniture that’s as sharp and white as John Travolta’s suit in Saturday Night Fever, including an iconic Eero Aarnio ball chair, swirly fire-engine-red fabrics and even red rubber flooring in the bathroom. It’s funky, it’s fun. Cross the threshold and you won’t be able to resist a full-on Bee Gee falsetto.
Wow factor: your pooch has its own room, with fitted dog bed.
Details: 01239 851410, www.underthethatch.co.uk; sleeps 2; from £153pp for a week.
THE GOSFORD PARK EXPERIENCE
Pevsner declared it one of the country’s most historically significant mansions, and Grade I-listed Halswell House, in Goathurst, Somerset, is certainly a masterclass in excess. There are 17 bedrooms, including one that has not just its own sitting room, but its own kitchen; while the “real” kitchen doesn’t just have any old Aga, but one with six ovens. It’s all sweeping staircases, crystal chandeliers and intricate antiques. Perfect ... if you know 33 people you could bear to spend a whole week with.
Wow factor: a rooftop hot tub with views over the ornamental lake.
Details: 0845 204 1066, www.thebigdomain.com; sleeps 34; from £515pp for a week.
WANDER LONELY
There remains something delightfully old-fashioned about the Lake District, with its traditional cruise boats, steam railways and endless illustrations of Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck. Just beyond the crowds of Bowness, Beech Manor is a lakeland mansion packed with nostalgic Victorian necessities such as a snooker room, a proper bar, an ornate balcony off the lounge, and there are five acres of woodland for the children to turn into base camps. It also has its own pier, so you can dip your toes into Windermere while quoting Wordsworth.
Wow factor: a private stretch of Lake Windermere.
Details: 01228 599960, www.cumbrian-cottages.co.uk; sleeps 12; from £200pp for a week.
WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS
It’s self-catering, Jim, but not as most of us know it. Pencalenick House, which sits majestically on Cornwall’s Pont Pill creek, looking over to historic Fowey, is the whistles-and-bells version. It’s a modernist hideaway, deep in du Maurier country, with wholesomely minimalist cedar and stone interiors, including a stunning 40ft reception hall, plasma-screen televisions, Mac computers, Philippe Starck bathrooms with Aveda toiletries and a spa therapy room. There’s also a chef, who prepares breakfast on the terrace, lazy picnics on the lawn and dazzling dinner parties, using ingredients from the organic kitchen garden.
Wow factor: comes with a private beach and a 1930s motor-sail boat with skipper.
Details: 020 7747 6858, www.pencalenickhouse.com; sleeps 13; from £577pp for three days, all-inclusive.
SPLENDID ISOLATION
Colin and Isabella Cawdor made Vanity Fair’s latest “best-dressed couples” list, and the five cottages and hunting lodge available for rent on their misty, heather-heavy Inverness estate are just as stylish as the 25th thane and his wife, a fact that owes more than a little to Isabella’s previous incarnation: she was once the fashion editor of Vogue magazine, and she has used all the experience gained from full-colour spreads to inject some boho chic into these old-money, log-fired rooms. Her starry connections also mean that the likes of the Beckhams and Kate Moss have tramped these grouse moors before you in search of the sun setting over the Moray Firth.
Wow factor: 60,000 acres of woods, pastures and valleys to call your own – and tiptop dinner-party name-dropping.
Details: 01667 402402, www.cawdor.com. The cottages sleep 2-6, with prices starting at £240pp for a week. Drynachan Lodge sleeps 22; from £195pp for a week.
NOVEL ENCOUNTERS
North Lees Hall is a tiny 16th-century tower house that punches well above its weight in terms of romance, with a fabulous spiral staircase, 6ft-wide stone fireplaces, four-poster beds hung with Elizabethan drapes, mullioned windows and views onto the Peak District’s Stanage Edge and its spectacularly wind-whipped walking country. Pretty Hathersage is within hiking distance, Chatsworth just a short drive away.
Wow factor: it’s thought to have been the model for Thornfield Hall, Mr Rochester’s home in Jane Eyre – but, thankfully, comes minus the madwoman in the attic.
Details: 0845 090 0194, www.vivat.org.uk; one apartment sleeps 2, the other 4; from £125pp for a week.
Bryn Cottages in West Wales - Stayed there a few weeks ago. So nice - the walks and views were great too. www.bryncottages.co.uk i think.
DJ Evans, London,
The one in Lymm wants up to £3,500 per week not £350 per week
Bob, Warrington, Cheshire