I've driven past this village before. Cottages have little stone bridges across the River Teff. In late spring, when rural Wiltshire practically reverberates with verdancy, I cannot think of a lovelier location.
I'm going with friends to Howard's House Hotel. The website photos for this historic dower house don't give much away. (Who chose a bedroom shot with luggage stand as focal point?) Though, as the Novelist points out on the phone, the menus "sound great".
"The nicest hotel terrace I've seen," he says when, through a stone arch, we find expanses of lawn laced with cherry blossom.
Manager Noële shows us to first- floor rooms. Mine, at the rear, is light, spacious and uneventful save for a Gothic window on to parking and potager, and excellent tea and coffee things in a leather box, with plenty of delicious biscuits. A shower attachment over the bath is the tricky sort, temperature-wise; a dark blind cuts out natural light.
"My parents would like this," says A, when I visit across the hall.
"Well I like it," says the Novelist, sipping tea on the edge of a four-poster of indeterminate age.
"Our bath has a spectacular view but taps at the wrong end for admiring it," says A.
"Unimportant," says the Novelist.
"A missed opportunity," she says.
REN toiletries meet with approval, especially when I reveal I have White Company in my bathroom.
Over pre-dinner drinks in the lively sitting room, we peruse menus (table d'hôte, à la carte, tasting, and grown-up wine list). No one rushes us.
I offer only edited highlights of dinner but it deserves a page of its own. Chef Nick Wentworth gets three fat yeses. A salad of heritage tomatoes (pale, flavour-packed) and grilled Crottin de Chavignol, seared foie gras with wood pigeon breast, braised lentils and tiny roast onions; Cornish hake on a bed of crushed potatoes and spinach dressed with pesto, darkly tender venison loin with juniper and port jus; chocolate and orange marquise, Cointreau syrup, orange ice cream.
We quit the tad-too-bright dining room for coffee and dominos in the sitting room. Evenings must have been like this, before TV.
A door thuds repeatedly below my room next morning. I tackle the shower. Comfy night, good linen, we agree, and breakfast bowls another blinder with full table service, no lazy buffet. Staff are exceptionally nice, and even the youngest can direct to Stonehenge. Fellow guests are polite, too. No one brays or sits about looking cool or showing off. It only heightens the sense of having stumbled across a well-guarded secret.
