This UK hotel is more like cluster of authentic French cottages – here’s what it’s like to stay

Tranquility and a taste of something akin to Provence can be found in North Yorkshire, says James Beveridge

Saturday 29 June 2024 03:36 EDT

Bucolic beauty: Escapism at Middleton Lodge (Rebecca Tappin)

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Everything about Middleton Lodge is delicately and exquisitely arranged to deliver tranquility, contentment and small moments of deep pleasure.

Take the mossy green ceramic dish carrying its calming cargo of frozen grapes and a herbal tea brewed from hibiscus, lemongrass and ginger – especially concocted to compliment the treatment I’ve just had (a reviving back of body massage, as you asked).

Or the candles steeped in tall glass boxes that flicker in corners and crannies. There are umbrellas stuffed into baskets. Tingly Perry Pear lotions from Noble Isle in the walk-in shower rooms. Fragrant scents waft up from the rustic gardens. Oatmeal-coloured herringbone blankets slung over chairs and loungers set with rugs. Everywhere is comforting stone, wood and grass. Birds whistle a dawn chorus. The wind swooshes gently through the trees. You feel blissfully at home — if your home was a luxury five-star Georgian estate in one of the most beautiful corners of North Yorkshire.

The mood music here is refined cosiness and light-touch grandeur. There are 200 acres of room to roam among wild meadows, natural lawns, low-slung herbaceous borders, mature oaks and a delightful old farmhouse with faded red slates. The latter has been artfully divided into the new Pool House, a fine-dining restaurant and the Dairy, restored in 2019 and now home to 11 lovely rooms, one of which is my sanctuary for a two-night stay. Clawfoot bath, four-poster bed, vintage Roberts radio: tick, tick, tick. This new accommodation looks more like a cluster of authentic Provencal cottages or, with their minty green front doors, a quintessential Cotswolds hamlet.

Inside the Pool House (Cecelina Tornberg)

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A favourite place was the extraordinarily lovely two-acre walled garden. Restored and redesigned in 2018, it is overflowing with natural beauty, climbing wisteria with fragrant blossom, blousy peonies, regimented rows of vegetables and salads beds and meandering slate paths. This is also where you will find the Fig House, where a dream wedding might be taking place, spilling out onto the lawn, with happy guests discreetly lodged in one of four private shepherd’s huts located at the far end of an orchard (there are hot tubs coming soon); or else in three ludicrously quaint potting shed rooms, dotted among the original outbuildings.

Middleton Lodge was bought by the Allison family in 1980. Owner James Allison grew up on site in the Main House and has spent the past 20 years restoring the 18th-century Palladian main house and Georgian outbuildings in a sustainable and thoughtful way.

This philosophy of careful curation extends to the people who work here. The staff are charming, skimming around unobtrusively (in regulation skinny jeans, button-down Oxford shirts and loafers), dispensing pre-dinner cocktails or setting up a cosy fire pit for guests to huddle round in the evening.

Time for a dip? The outdoor at Middleton Lodge (Rebecca Tappin)

Guests eat extremely well. The Coach House, the more informal dining area located in the original part of the hotel in the heart of the Georgian courtyard, is a very pleasant place to enjoy breakfast and dinner. Expect dishes such as crumbly asparagus tart spiked with pickled walnuts followed by an sublime cote de boeuf. The Forest Spa also does a healthy but still very tasty menu. Start with bulgur wheat, roasted and raw cauliflower, cumin yoghurt and toasted pomegranate seeds, before tucking in to grilled chalk stream trout, served with pink fir apple potatoes and warm tartare sauce. Both incredible.

Vintage bikes for borrowing are found learning against the wall under the arch in the courtyard. Deeply nurturing therapies and treatments take place in a series of six small huts set among ancient woods, each with their own names scrawled on a blackboard outside the door: Rosemary, Yarrow, Thyme, Seaweed, Verbena, Lavender. Be-robed guests are led there from the main forge building out through a meadow sprouting with herbs and flowers.

The whole experience is carefully orchestrated but with a relaxed, informal and personal touch. You are never rushed, and never feel crowded in. The hotel has a clever pre-booking policy for the spa and pool which means it never feels remotely busy.

The Dairy has been transformed into a series of delightful rooms (Cecelina Tornberg)

There’s a gorgeous and generously sized heated outdoor pool – a smart move in this part of North Yorkshire – and I did lazy lengths, happily watching the steam rise gently off the surface of the water. Next to that is a hot tub under a pergola, and beyond it a long, low tranquil pool room with a log burner for relaxation. Need something a bit more reviving? Take a pew in the sauna or steam room, and drop into the body-blitzing cold of the arch stone plunge pool afterwards if you dare.

At the atmospheric Forge restaurant on the last night, the feast was a full 10-course tasting menu with inventive wine pairings. Why not? Dish after dazzling dish is brought out by polite, enthusiastic young chefs and waiting staff. It’s not fussy. It’s just life-affirmingly good. And so much of what’s cooked for us finds its way to our plates from the estate’s natural larder.

Dare to leave this idyll for an afternoon? A bracing walk in the Dales awaits, or you could choose to wander through one of the lovely towns and villages, such as Richmond, with its Norman castle and market, or dinky Reeth, set dramatically above the meandering River Swale. Head east and get lost in the wilds of the North Yorkshire Moors. Either way, make sure to try a pint of locally brewed Black Sheep bitter before you come home.

Middleton Estate calls itself somewhere to inspire, eat, gather and pause. I couldn’t put it any better myself.

Rooms from £270, B&B