A Weekend Six Miles and 1000 Years Away

     With all the travel we’ve planned for the year, a short time (one night) away sounded like a good idea.

    It wasn’t.

    It was a great idea.

    Old Downton Lodge.  We've been here before, on our 23rd (24th?) wedding anniversary but only Scott has actually stayed the night, on another occasion while I was away.

    Not so easy to find, on a series of very narrow lanes with few lay-bys and lots and lots of pheasants. Juvenile pheasants just released to grow fat and happy, until hunting season in the autumn.

    We drive past farmland and field and not much else, to arrive at the end of a paved road and a series of old (in the very literal English sense of old) buildings – turn-of-the-millennium (not 1999 but 999!), mediaeval, half-timbered, Georgian – surrounded by a very tall wall with an open cartway.

    At dusk, the barn swallows flit in and out. And then come the bats. We enjoyed watching them during our first dinner here.

    You know you’re in the country when the sun goes down: there is no light pollution, and on a clear night you can easily see the Milky way. 

    Inside the main building are the sitting room, dining room and kitchen.

    The sitting room was once a grand milking barn and the dining room was built around the time of the Norman conquest (1066). Both the Sitting Room and the Dining Room boast wall tapestries that invoke mediaeval times when you had to put carpets on the brick/stone walls to help keep the heat in and the cold out.

    Dining in this thousand-year-old space does not include 1000-year-old recipes. Indeed, Chef Nick Bennett is inspired by and sources much of his ingredients locally, including really yummy English wine. (yes there is really good wine made here in England.)

I'm finishing off the bottle
today 😉

    But our evening begins with Champagne.  (It’s my birthday so of course, Champagne!)

    First courses are Isle of Wight Tomato for Scott and a Cured Grey Mullet for me.

    Main courses:  Gressingham duck and a Cod Loin with a bouillabaisse Sauce. Scott was grumpy because the duck he consumed here is (a little) better than what he does in the kitchen at home.
    Our dinner is topped off with an impressive display of cheeses for Scott and Strawberry with white balsamic jelly, clotted cream and basil for the birthday girl.

    On to the little building (an old side barn) that houses our room for the night. A latch opens onto the spacious bath and a short stairway to the bedroom. Wood-vaulted ceilings that perhaps housed critters in another era (no termites in this country: too cold). We look out our window to see four young pheasants milling around the flower beds - nervous little guys, perhaps knowing their fate later this year.

    The bed is comfortable enough for the two of us and the black-out curtains keep the early sun from waking us. And the bathroom boasts a roomy walk-in shower with Scott's favourite rainforest shower head.

    Breakfast is straight forward and delicious: a traditional English Breakfast with bacon, sausage, black pudding, mushroom, tomato, eggs any way you wish, and any kind of toast you wish. Most inns and hotels I visit in the U.K. don’t normally offer cream for coffee in the morning.  Old Downton Lodge does.

    We’ll be back.

PS: If you go to their website  –  olddowntonlodge.com  – there are such beautiful photos of the place that we just didn’t bother to take our own.  Except these: