Bishopstrow Hotel and Spa relaunched this summer, with freshly-decorated rooms and a focus on its “no-dig” kitchen garden.
It has all the hallmarks of a good-value country house hotel, but with features that you won’t find among its competitors, from ancient landmarks to a dream-like secret water garden in the Wiltshire Chalk area that has this week been earmarked as one of dozens of Natural England projects to revive some of England’s most threatened species.
Where is it?
Just outside Warminster – where GWR trains arrive from Bristol, Cardiff, London Waterloo and Portsmouth – in south-west Wiltshire, close to the Somerset border.
The ambience
It’s elegantly informal, and you won’t feel out of place shuffling through the Georgian house in your spa robe and slippers, or hurling discs across the huge lawn as you attempt a game of disc-golf, ideally avoiding the onlooking flock of sheep.
We loved seeking out the hidden tunnel to the water garden on the banks of the serene River Wylye, where we chatted to gardener Darren Stephens as he cast aside an enormous squash (“too big for the kitchen”) and collected produce for that night’s dinner service. Dragonflies darted over the chalk stream while the sun bathed a Georgian summer house and folly, which will eventually become a bucolic dining space.
The rooms
While the metamorphosis is ongoing in some of the public areas, the 34 bedrooms are reinvigorated. Expect a zesty mix of brightly-patterned wallpapers, an eclectic mix of artwork (the needlepoint series of dogs in our room is possibly an acquired taste) and flourishes such as copper roll-top baths, private patio gardens and hot tubs.
Five courtyard rooms are ground-floor with wider doors, but while bathrooms have walk-in showers, they are not specifically adapted for wheelchair users.
Dogs are welcome, charged at £30 per night including welcome treats.
The food and drink
The farm-to-fork focus means that the purple-sprouting broccoli accompanying the truffled polenta and chestnut mushroom ragu will have been picked that morning, while grilled chalk stream trout with sautéed snap peas will be just as fresh.
The Garden Grill dinner menu is divided into sea, soil, land and fire, much of it local and all of it tempting. The afternoon tea similarly showcases local highlights, from strawberries to smoked salmon.
What to do
Plenty of guests come here for the spa, with its indoor and outdoor pools (that will soon be replaced with a natural pool using the on-site, limestone-filtered borehole that already feeds the spa) and hot tubs. There are also bikes to borrow.
However, the hotel is also an ideal base for exploring all that this part of the South-West has to offer. Longleat House and safari park are a 15-minute drive, while Stonehenge and Avebury stone circles are a little further (20 minutes and 45 minutes respectively). Nearby towns and cities include Bath (30 mins), Frome (20 mins) and Glastonbury (one hour).
More broadly, it’s worth exploring the Wiltshire Chalk area, which encompasses a large area from the Cranborne Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, to Salisbury Plain and whose habitats will soon receive much-needed funding with a view to restoring their biodiversity.
Nearby projects include the River Wylye – an idyllic waterway embroidered with thatched villages, pubs and farms – and the grasslands of Parsonage Down National Nature Reserve.
You’ll love…
The 30 acres of grounds set this hotel apart. After a blissful hour spent wandering through the water garden, we headed to the back of the hotel, where we found three Bronze Age and neolithic long and bowl barrows hidden among the trees and next to the tennis court.
To book
Bishopstrow Hotel, Boreham Road, Warminster, Wiltshire BA12 9HH. Doubles start at £150 B&B.