Best 10 top hotels in Lake District
- Broadgate House, Broughton-in-Furness
- The Angel Inn, Bowness-on-Windermere
- Littletown Farm, Newlands
- Sandhills Farm, Keswick
- The Masons Arms, Cartmel Fell
- Irton Hall, Eskdale
- The Crown at High Newton
- Apple Pie Rooms, Ambleside
- The Lodge in the Vale
- Rosemount, Windermere
One for those who seek to a grand country house hotel but don't quite have the funds to match, the five bedrooms at this stately Georgian B&B are dressed with traditional beds, rocking chairs and chests of drawers and lined with comfortingly chintzy wallpaper.
A bit of a surprise in Bowness-on-Windermere, where the competition tends to do a good deal in scampi and chips and frozen lasagnes – at this inn with rooms you're more likely to find Morecambe Bay potted shrimp, or wild boar and apple sausages, on the menu. In the summer grab one of the tables in the terraced garden for a food with a view.
The name of this simple but cozy farmhouse B&B in the Newlands Valley will ring bells with Beatrix Potter fans; "Little-town" farm features in the Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and its environs are said to have inspired the book. Brass bedsteads, embellished throws and toys.
On first appearance this is your typical Lake District farm, surrounded by fells and fields on the shores of Bassenthwaite Lake. Step closer, however, and you see that the property's barn has been re-imagined as a modern, three-room B&B.
Looking out over the Winter Valley, at Windermere's southern edge, this gastropub with rooms is huge if you're swithering between B&B and self-catering. Its two cottages and five suites are scattered between the pub and its contiguous buildings and each come with kitchens, though most guests don't use them unless they desire a full cooked breakfast, which the pub doesn't offer.
In the Eskdale Valley, the vast crenellated pile that is Irton Hall dates back to the 14th century (though much of it was reconfigured in the 19th), and both Oliver Cromwell and Henry VI are down on its roll-call of previous guests.
Not everyone needs to be in a Beatrix Potter-style world of bedside posies, flagstone floors, Farrow & Ball paintwork and craftily mismatched furniture when they come to the Lakes.
The bedtime equivalent of comfort food, the eight modern rooms here aren't trying to reinvent the wheel but simply to provide a polite night's sleep.
Opened last year on the site of a former youth hostel, The Lodge bills itself as a hotel but its better approach instead as a smart, contemporary hostel.
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