I’m staying in a cottage! An actual cottage in a quaint little English village! My parents planned to go to Austria but for… reasons… I decided not to go with them, and then they didn’t go anyway. But I did have vague ideas of having a “wellness break” in December and so this is it.
I don’t think I’ve ever stayed in a cottage before. They might once have been an excellent option for a cheap UK stay but now you can generally find a decent hotel for less and so I’ve never done it. My grandmother, who still thinks it’s the 1940s, decided once she was on her own that she wanted to go off for summer holidays with her friend Jean (or Eve? Pam? Well, it’s got to be one of them because that lot share about four names between all of them). They didn’t want a hotel, they “just wanted a little cottage by the sea”, with no concept whatsoever that that’s the most expensive option you can choose in this century, especially during the summer. But the plague is still with us, or it was at time of booking and it really was by the time I got there, and I still prefer my own self-contained place over a hotel with lots of rooms and lots of strangers coming and going.
My cottage is called The Forge, Marksbury, which is six or seven miles south of Bath. I assume it used to be a forge but you never know with things like this; sometimes people just pick a cute name and pretend. The rental company has 44 cottages on its books with the word “forge” in their names, several of which are plain ugly new-builds that definitely were never forges, so who knows? Anyway, my Forge looked like a characterful little place, a one-bedroom one-floor cottage with a reasonably large bedroom, an open plan kitchen-diner with old wooden beams holding the pointed ceiling up, a full-size fridge-freezer, a washing machine and something described in the booking details as an “electric AGA double oven” which sounds quite intimidating. Reviews on the website the day I booked it said that the heating is permanently on and it was too hot but most of those reviews were around June/July and I’m here in December, so I’m expecting to love the heating. It’s in a nice little village, opposite the church and as it’s surrounded by countryside, I plan to go out for a nice walk.
The reason I picked the area was the aforementioned “wellness break” idea. I wanted a spa break but those are expensive and impractical and besides, they want to include three-course meals I’m not going to eat. Ok, so go somewhere I can do a spa day. Bath Thermae Spa! So I found myself a cottage within easy reach of the spa. Spoiler right now: what with Omicron ripping through the world, and it not being practical to wear a mask inside, including to reach the rooftop pool which is the only place where I’d be happy to be maskless, I decided the spa would still be there when (if?) all this is over and gave it a miss this time.
First, the Forge is not as characterful as it looked. It’s right on that main road, which I knew from booking and from reviews, and it’s also on the side of someone’s drive. You can park there to unload but you know your neighbour could come back at any minute and I for one would be annoyed if someone else’s holiday cottage used my drive for access – the notes strongly hint that it isn’t the owners living at the top of the drive. You have to park on the road, which is fine. No shortage of places to park on these little residential roads but I’m also aware of the parking politics on my own road. Whose unofficial unspoken space am I stealing? What neighbourhood tensions am I inadvertently stirring up?
The cottage, as I said, isn’t really characterful. It’s quite modern and quite cosy. It’s a small house or apartment, really, not a cottage at all. Calling it uncharacterful and not a cottage isn’t a criticism. The pointed ceiling is hidden by panels at both ends, leaving an ordinary low flat ceiling in the bedroom and above the living room and tantalising glimpse of a potential upstairs visible only from the kitchen.
After a lot of peering and jumping, I finally figured out how to be nosy. I’d taken my tripod with me so I connected my camera to my phone to operate as a remote, extended my tripod to its full height and lifted it up above my head like a periscope. It’s quite awkward to balance one-handed but I needed the other to take the photos using the phone app. And so I discovered that the end above the bedroom is full of plastic storage boxes and has a ladder attached above the locked hatch and the end above the living room is mostly empty, give or take some odds and ends.
This is a cottage meant for older people, I think. The sort of people who appreciate a set of matching Denby rather than a mish-mash of cute vintage plates gathered from an assortment of charity shops. IKEA cutlery, obviously, but good china. Elements Blue, I think, in case some crockery you haven’t even seen influences you to buy a new set. That said, I’m only waiting until I have a home of my own to inherit an entire massive collection of matching Purbeck Pottery Brown Diamond china, which I believes contains some items whose uses I can’t even imagine. Not seen it in well over twenty years but I’m going to have a matching set of Good China myself eventually.
Everything else was purple-tinted. Deep purple rug, purple armchair, purple sofa, purple bottom sheet on the bed, purple Aga and a pile of mauve towels. But with the white kitchen and walls, it didn’t descend into the sort of blackcurrant heaven it probably would if I decided to make my cottage purple. Tasteful, of course. Purple accents while somehow remaining neutral without descending to influencer-greige.
Lots of kitchen cupboards, containing everything I could want, from an iron to tiered tin stands to Tupperware. I had a dishwasher and washing machine and the tablets to put in both. A full-size fridge-freezer. Scales, measuring jug, pie dishes with fluted edges, all sorts of pots and pans and trays. But with all that, it didn’t leave space anywhere to put my food away except the very top cupboards where I’d struggle to reach much. I think you’re supposed to use the corner cupboard with the sliding door but there’s something on every shelf in there too. So I did what I always do: left it in my bag on the worktop.
The bathroom had a shower with the controls well out of the spray. Always a nice touch, not having to get wet when you switch it on. It also had a full-length heated towel rail which I used to dry some stuff after it got muddy and had to be washed. Can’t fault the bathroom, except that I really can’t go three days without a bath. Also, although I swear I remember going in there, I didn’t actually take any photos of the bathroom but I’m sure you can imagine it. It’s in that corner next to the kitchen, opposite the TV.
The living room had a two-seater sofa facing the TV and an armchair that didn’t. The TV had a DVD player and because the sound isn’t great, a separate sound bar. To be fair, it made a huge difference. I took my Farscape season one boxset. When the batteries died in the sound bar remote and I had to use the TV’s sound, despite turning the volume up, I could barely catch a word, especially on the echoey Zelbinion. I don’t normally watch TV when I’m away so the sound bar would normally be something I’m utterly oblivious to but I saw the DVD player in the pictures and I wanted to watch Farscape!
And then there was the bedroom. Old person furniture: a chair of the kind I haven’t seen since my granny’s house, a big wooden linen box at the end of the bed, mirrored sliding wardrobes and a huge dark wooden chest of drawers. Fat pillows and a very puffy warm duvet – too warm for me. The reviews were right, it gets hot in that place and the bedroom window doesn’t open. The double door does but I’m not sleeping with a door open.
I wasn’t sleeping at all. Reviews had mentioned road noise from the A39 right outside but no one had mentioned the light. The double doors had Venetian blinds and curtains. The window just had the blind and I assure you, it does not block out headlights all night long nor the streetlight opposite. The green lights on the wifi router down the side of the bed were almost as bad. I can tune out road noise but I can’t sleep unless it’s dark. Even better, there’s a light-operated night light which immediately lit up the room in blinding blue when I switched the ceiling lights off. That got unplugged, switched off and put out of sight immediately. It’s already light enough to read a book at midnight in December with the lights off, you don’t need a nightlight!
The upshot was, far from a wellness break, I came back more far more tired and stressed than before I went. That’s mostly because of no sleep whatsoever for three nights but also the plague situation escalating. I enjoyed Monday morning, having a late breakfast and sprawling on the little sofa to read a book instead of getting up for my work meeting at 9.30am but after that, tiredness and stress set in, along with the feeling that I should be doing something on my holiday.
No, next time I stay in a cottage in a village, I want it in the back of beyond. I want it to be so dark I can’t find my bed and I want to hear shrieking wildlife all night and no roads. Will I go back? No, I won’t. It’s not a bad cottage and if it even just had a curtain, I’d be more inclined to return and even more inclined if it could be picked up and plonked somewhere away from the main road. It’s just the light. I can’t sleep with that much light and I’m not going back to somewhere I can’t sleep. Rural Somerset, on the other hand, definitely open to but not the Forge.