I have a habit of feeling a desire to go away in winter, somewhere cosy, where I’ll wear cute cottagecore outfits and I’ll just relax and read books and it’ll be a winter wellness break. In 2020 and 2022, I went glamping in a shepherd’s hut with amazing views but it seems that particular hut has vanished. The site is still there, as are the other three huts but that one is gone. In 2021, I stayed at a cottage near Bath where I had an Aga to wrestle with. And this year, I went off to Cornwall, to Spring Park, where I stayed in the autumn of 2021. That time, I stayed in Pip & Pip’s Cabin. Pip is a 1930s steam roller living van and it served as the bedroom, with a cabin as kitchen, living room and bathroom. I’m sure it’s lovely in the summer but by October, I really didn’t want to be going out at night, locking up my cottage and scurrying across my private garden to a bedroom that doesn’t lock from the outside. I know no one’s going to be lurking either in Pip or in the garden but it still didn’t feel comfortable so when I decided to go back this year, I spent some time picking one of their eight options that didn’t involve a separate bedroom.
What I landed on was St Agnes, a tin tabernacle with quite a large private garden, slate patio, hot tub right outside the bedroom window and an inside bathroom. Before I went, I had quite the argument with myself about whether it was technically “glamping or not”. It’s certainly glamorous but is there are stretch of the definition of “camping” that includes a tiny church? Well, when I lit the hot tub on Friday evening, I saw down the back of the church and… it’s a shepherd’s hut. It’s pretending to be a solid little building but it’s got wheels, even if they’re hidden away. So, yes, it’s glamping.
Pip’s Cabin was very characterful. Open shelves, lots of vintage kitchenware, rugs and throws everywhere, interesting bits and bobs on every surface. St Agnes still has the characterful touches but it feels a bit… I don’t want to say cleaner but if I do, I mean in the sense of clean and modern lines rather than “it’s not dirty”. Pip’s Cabin absolutely wasn’t dirty. it just had that glamping, vintage, raided-the-charity-shops-for-grandma’s-unwanted-glassware look about it. It had enough kitchenware for two and enough for a second meal and that’s fine, that’s all you need, but Pip’s Cabin seemed to have an absolute abundance of decorative glasses and piles of plates. Pip’s Cabin is the reason I have a set of decorative green beaded glasses, one of which is on my desk right now. St Agnes’ drinking glasses were, I suspect, from Ikea.
When you come in the door, you’re straight into the kitchen. Well, it’s all one small room so you’re everywhere but the first thing you see in front of you is the kitchen. It has a little cooker that’s usually installed on houseboats, with a gas hob, oven and grill, a sunken sink that I think is actually one of these desirable Belfast sinks, and a proper fridge disguised as an ordinary cupboard. There’s an assortment of kitchen utensils, cookware, plates and cups and everything you need as well as a little pile of cleaning stuff. So far, so good. What it’s missing is anywhere to put your food. I rearranged the cupboard – that is, I put the wooden cutlery tray on the worktop and piled all the tea & coffee caddies at one end of the other shelf to make some room.
Let’s turn left. Behind the door, tucked into the corner opposite the kitchen is the woodburner, a basket of logs, a basket of kindling and a jar of firelighters. Bless them, these people really understand that logs don’t spontaneously ignite – so many of them just give you logs. If you use up your logs, there’s a cupboard containing bags of logs, kindling and firelighters. The notice inside says there’s newspaper but I didn’t see any and there are matches – I had a clicky gas lighter but it only lasted one click. So glad I didn’t have to make the round trip to Tesco in Launceston to get some matches. You can either leave your money in there or you can pay by bank transfer, which means you don’t need cash. I still had half a dozen logs from my 2021 stay, just rattling around in the back of my car, nicely seasoned and just ready to pop in the hot tub.
Behind the woodburner is the bathroom. It’s actually an enormous bathroom by shepherd’s hut standards, by far the biggest I’ve ever had and with a big waterfall shower. Not really anywhere to put stuff. I left it all in my washbag hanging from the back of the door but if you want to put things out on and around the sink, you’re out of luck. Even the handwash was balanced precariously on the windowsill. The tradeoff, of course, is that you’ve actually got room to move and you don’t bang your elbows on the shower walls. The sink and toilet have got a bit of a late Victorian vibe to them but I guess in general St Agnes has taken the aesthetic out of the cottagecore cosy forest and taken a bit of a step towards the real world. It’s still cosy but it’s not trying to evoke an idealised rural past which never actually existed.
Speaking of the real world, St Agnes has an electric heater, lighting and sockets, which is more than many shepherd’s huts and glamping places offer. Even at my beloved Forager, they only installed mains electricity fairly recently and I had to rely on a solar panel for a single light bulb which I had to use minimally alongside candles the first time I stayed because winter means solar electricity is in short supply. The electric heater is only one of these plug-in oil heaters like you’d get at Argos but it’s nice to know you don’t have to rely on your firelighting skills to stave off hypothermia. There’s no wifi and mobile coverage is patchy, especially when it rains.
Back out of the bathroom and on the other side of the kitchen is the bedroom and living space. At the far end is a stained glass window overlooking the hot tub and there’s a double bed underneath it, raised just far enough off the ground for two drawers and a low cupboard, which is about all the storage space you get here. At Forager, now departed, there was a huge crawlspace under the bed, which admittedly made the bed a bit of a pain to get in and out of. Between the bed and the kitchen is a pair of armchairs and a folding table. A little evidence that glamping is intended for summer: the armchairs are far too low to sit at the table which means your choices for eating are in the armchair with the plate on your lap; sitting on the bed, or at the bistro table outside. There are two windows along the front of the building to give you views over your own private garden but none on the back wall where you’d be overlooking the hedge. Almost as if the tin tabernacle was designed for its space rather than rescued and repurposed from a real one.
Outside your own garden is surrounded by hedges. Pip has this too but the trees in the middle of the garden and the fact that it’s fairly thin gave it the impression of being a much smaller garden. I’m sure in the summer you’d spend all your time on the loungers out here. I’d say “or playing football with the kids” but there really isn’t room for kids in St Agnes. It’s also not quite as private as I’d expected. Yeah, you’re out of sight of your neighbours, especially in the hot tub, but I can see the lights from Hercules opposite twinkling through the trees, and I look straight into Hercules’ garden as I walk to my own garden. And I can see the Potting Shed from the bathroom window, which is high enough that they can’t see much in. I could also hear voices from the Potting Shed and from my parking space, I could see Pip. From the image on Google Maps, my back hedge is the back wall for one of the other houses, which I think is Duke. There’s a good 22ft of hedge between our two hot tubs but that’s not a whole lot. I will say, though, I never heard a sound from behind so it’s possibly, nay likely, there was no one there.
Oh yeah, the hot tub. That’s the most important thing. I wouldn’t be there without a hot tub. Mine was outside my bedroom window which meant if I left the lights on inside, I wasn’t not sitting outside in total darkness in the evening, which was a problem I had with Forager, where I could see the glow from the round porthole high above but had no idea what was going on inside. I also had a string of bulb lights between the chapel and the trees, lights which actually worked so I appreciated that even by night, it wasn’t terrifyingly dark out there – but I also had a high-powered headtorch sitting on the hot tubs steps. Hedges rustle alarmingly in the dark and I like to be able to check that there’s neither a lion nor a murderer creeping up on me.
There’s a log box outside next to the hot tub – this is your outdoors supply but of course, you can always bring in the smaller logs for use in your indoor log burner. There isn’t space for a huge amount inside so there’s just the basket with a handful of kindling and a second basket with half a dozen short logs. I’m sure it’s a fresh supply brought for you the day you move in – or at least, the day the previous occupant moved out – but because it lives outside, it’s just damp enough that you can’t detect it but you also struggle to set them on fire. At least, I do. A fresh batch from the log cupboard always catches fire so much quicker and easier than the ones I’m provided with. That log cupboard is a wonderful thing. I didn’t use my entire jar of firelighters but I also knew that it didn’t matter if I did. I could just go and get some more. I didn’t have to ask the owner or go to Tesco, so I didn’t have to be sparing with anything. Being sparing seems to be the way to get a fire to refuse to light. Pile in some dry logs, fill every space with kindling, pop in your firelighter and come back when there’s space to put in another log. I set a rigorous timer of going back to check every ten or twenty minutes on Friday night. None of that on Saturday or Sunday. Fill, pile, light and shove in more whenever there’s space.
The hot tub is a fairly high, relatively small oval variety with a white plastic liner and a coloured light inside. The one at Forager is bigger and rounder; the one at the Pleasant Pheasant was basically a tin bath with a wood burner in the water. Actually, St Agnes’ hot tub is wonky. The water is right up against the top at the end nearest the church, so it slops over the edge if I move too quickly. I also found that if I left a drink on the steps, it tended to get filled with hot tub water if I’m not extremely careful. At the other end, there’s a good three inches of clear space between the water and the rim of the tub so it doesn’t overflow at that end. I like that it’s right outside my house rather than across the garden like it seems to be at some of the other little houses here.
Elsewhere in the garden, I had the aforementioned bistro set right outside my door, I had a couple of odd leaning grey plastic chairs on the patio next to the hot tub and there were some wooden chairs and a little fire circle under the trees. No evidence of a barbecue, which is visible in the photos on the website but maybe they put them away for the winter, knowing people probably won’t use them anyway and they’ll just end up rusty by summer.
Is there anything else to say about St Agnes? Is that an adequate tour? It’s a cross between a shepherd’s hut and a tiny house, it doesn’t quite have enough storage, it’s pretty much got everything you need for a couple of days and although it’s not totally isolated, it’s pretty private – more so than its neighbours. Will I go back? I’d definitely consider going back to Spring Park, yes, but I’d like to try out another of the houses. Maybe Duke. Duchess looks nice but I’m not sure I’d appreciate “large separate bathroom house” in the middle of the night, even if it does have a real bath. Yeah, give Duke a go next time.
If you want to see St Agnes in motion, I did a video tour which you can watch here.