Lift the spirits and venture into nature by planning a unique late winter or spring getaway for the family – uncover the delights the stunning UK countryside has to offer from the Lake District to the Jurassic Coast
At around this time of year, a relaxing hotel stay with the family could be just the thing to give us a lift amid the winter gloom. Or maybe your thoughts have already turned to spring, when the family will be ready for a break.
There’s nothing better to blow away the cobwebs of the cooler months than getting out into nature and letting the kids run or swim free while the adults in the family can enjoy a relaxing spa or indulge in some fine-dining cuisine.
As the new Good Hotel Guide goes live online, we asked their team to suggest five great family-friendly hotels. There’s something to delight all ages with stays in star-gazing treehouses, sea views of a beach where you can go dolphin-spotting, and even a hotel with a lakeside ice rink. Here are their top picks.
Toddlers up to age three stay for free in their parents’ room at this resort on the 500-acre Farncombe Estate in Cotswold countryside above photogenic Broadway. Centred on a Scandi-style lodge, with accommodation scattered over the hillside, it comprises rooms and suites in a former coach house, stables and other buildings, as well as adults-only shepherds’ huts and three ‘treehouses’ with bunks for kids aged up to 12.
Tiny tots will like the outdoor play area, but this is more a destination to appeal to adventurous older children, with paid-for activities for those aged 12 and upwards, including archery and axe-throwing. Falconry is open to all from age four; wine tastings are for adults only, and duck herding is for large groups.
The rooms are country chic, with a soothing pale palette, all with an espresso machine, smart TV, Temple Spa toiletries. Some have a private terrace with views over the Vale of Evesham, and a few interconnect. A bar/lounge menu provides a casual dining option, with burgers, hot dogs, salads and light bites. For more sophisticated dining, Hook by Martin Burge has a fairly wide-ranging menu, strong on seafood, with such options as haddock schnitzel with smoked anchovies, sauce gribiche and seaweed fries alongside steak bèarnaise with roasties. A children’s menu, vegan dishes and Sunday roast beef should keep everyone happy.
And if raptors, axes and bows, and arrows aren’t your thing, you can borrow maps from the boot room and explore, or, when the sun shines, bag a deckchair beside a small lake.
B&B doubles from £220, family suites from £295, rooms with terrace from £275, extra bed for child 3-16 years £60.
Close to and a world away from Salcombe, lapped by gently rolling National Trust countryside, wildflower bejewelled and ablaze with gorse in summer, this low-built hotel is the perfect child-friendly, dog-friendly bolthole for an outdoorsy break. Formerly the 10-bedroom Sea View Guest House, unofficial officers’ mess for Bolt Head Airfield, and once famed for its meringue afternoon teas, it has been owned, run and cherished by the Makepeace family since 1978.
The 22 smart-contemporary rooms and suites – all but one at ground level – have glass doors to a patio and were designed to optimise the stunning views. The sheltered beach is one of the loveliest in South Hams, perfect for paddling, sandcastle-building, crabbing, dolphin-spotting. Guests have use of the spa and indoor saltwater swimming pool, a lounge with books and board games.
Activities locally include sea safaris and seal-watching trips. You can order a picnic (crab sandwiches!) and walk the Southwest Coast Path, return for a cream tea (no meringues now), dine in the glass-walled, sea-facing restaurant on such dishes as Fowey mussels with sea herbs and mussel velouté, Dexter beer burger, fish and chips, cauliflower steak with sauternes raisins, cauliflower purée, pickled shallots and romesco sauce. There is a short kids’ menu, and the night’s desserts might include the Pavlova that Audrey Hepburn declared ‘divine’ when she visited in 1987. Mobile coverage here is limited, so it’s a detox for screen-addicted teens – no Facetime, just pure quality time.
Family rooms from £211.50 (continental breakfast; cooked breakfast £15).
Kids stay free when sharing with parents at this Jacobean manor house in 14-acre grounds amid the Wiltshire countryside, part of the small Luxury Family Hotels collection. Everything is geared to making families feel welcome and relaxed, with the Ofsted-registered Four Bears Den, where children aged eight and under enjoy arts and crafts, toys, dressing up and outdoor adventures.
There is a spa, indoor pool and, in summer, a heated outdoor pool, a library with pool table, air hockey and table football, the Green Fingers gardening club in the walled garden with its resident ducks and hens. Organised activities include Cooking with Chef, jewellery-making and tropical-animal discovery sessions.
Book a Baby’s First Break package and they’ll provide a Bugaboo cot and giraffe highchair and a baby monitor. With all the family bases covered, the hotel is not short on the promised luxury, with comfy lounges, beautifully presented bedrooms, indulgent spa treatments and adults-only swim times.
You can order a cream tea in the garden, dine informally in the Orangery, or in either of two dining rooms, one dog friendly, from a menu of steaks, burger, fish and chips, maybe lentil dahl, garden pumpkin, chickpea, smoked onion and coriander, or sea trout with crushed potato and fennel. Literary buffs should check out also, sister properties Fowey Hall, Cornwall, believed to have been Kenneth Graham’s model for Toad Hall, and Moonfleet Manor, Dorset, which inspired John Meade Faulkner’s 1898 novel of shipwrecks and smuggling, Moonfleet.
B&B family rooms for around £246.
‘A very strange stranger it must be who does not see the charms in the immediate environs of Lyme,’ wrote Jane Austen in Persuasion. Like Austen, Kathryn Haskins spent happy family holidays in this historic resort on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast. In fact, her parents were so smitten with its charms that, in 1982, they bought Lyme’s landmark hotel. A Georgian house built for the Earl and Countess of Poulett, it is now owned by Kathryn, who brings to it her experience of working in hotels around the world, and who can personally vouch for its appeal to a child.
The ambience is informal, the interiors achieving a kind of unshowy chic without upstaging the glorious sea views. Some larger bedrooms can sleep four, or families might take one of two self-catering apartments, each big enough for six. Apartment guests have access to all hotel facilities, and menu items can be delivered by room service.
In the light-filled Ammonite Restaurant, typical dishes include pan-fried halibut, fried polenta, cauliflower puree, cranberry gel; ribeye steak and chips; gnocchi. ‘It’s like staying in a comfy country-house hotel,’ says Guide readers, all of whom have particularly warm words for the staff. And, since family is not just about children, a word of praise for the ‘personal touches’ that really made the stay for one reader and her parents on their Golden Wedding anniversary. Ask for a packed lunch and spend the day fossil hunting, walking the coastal paths, swimming, sailing, windsurfing, and return with an appetite for afternoon tea.
B&B large doubles from £330, cots £8, extra bed for a child £44.
There is a real Swallows and Amazons vibe at this dog-friendly new lifestyle resort, the frumpy old Rampsbeck Hotel reinvented as a cool destination. As well as fabulously stylish bedrooms and suites, some for families, in the original Georgian house and modern wings, there is a two-bedroom treehouse with decking and outdoor bath, and shepherds’ huts, some with an extra bunk room, all with a log burner and star-gazing roof.
This is a place that revels in the landscape and in its lakeside situation, where days might be spent wild swimming, paddleboarding, hiking and fell walking. Right now, too, because it’s winter, there’s even a lakeshore ice rink. Other facilities include a 20metre indoor pool, outdoor hot tub, cardio and treatment rooms. The Ofsted-registered Kids’ Zone encourages learning through play: staff take the youngsters outside as much as possible to follow animal footprints, build campfire and go on nature hunts with ‘bingo’ sheets for outdoor I-Spy.
In the fine-dining Rampsbeck Restaurant, menus feature such locally sourced dishes as roast Cartmel Valley venison haunch, caramelised celeriac puree, savoy cabbage, Anna potato, pickled walnut ketchup, venison samosa, juniper sauce (from the children’s menu maybe garden patch soup, mac and cheese, chocolate brownie). There is more casual dining in the Living Space (steak and fries, rice bowls, wraps and burgers), woodfired pizzas in the Glasshouse by the vegetable garden, and hearty pub grub at sister venture The Brackenrigg.
B&B doubles, Stay and Skate from £240, family room from around £340, extra bed for age 3-plus 25% of double room price.