Getaway Castle Green Hotel
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Getaway: Castle Green Hotel
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The thing that is most striking upon travelling up the winding driveway of the somewhat remote Castle Green Hotel is just how busy the place is, filled with a cross section of custom from older couples, Japanese tourists, family parties and wedding crashers. You can see Kendal Castle from up here - a 12th century ruin on top of a hill in the village which makes for a fantastic walk, and helps to further compound the legacy of your surroundings. Look around the 14 acres of lush grounds around Castle Green and you’ll see every aspect of the Kendal lifestyle, from the sheep which patrol the fields nearby to the low bridges and country roads, the on site pub (Alexanders) to the Tudor-esque tranquillity of the Green Rooms health spa and gardens. It’s the perfect idyllic hideaway for those who don’t really want to be too far away from other people.
Of course, when we visit it might just have been a particularly busy period for the hotel, given that we’re visiting in August at the height of the holiday season, but with 100 rooms there’s plenty of space, almost deceivingly so. The layout is a bit of a maze, so it may take you a while to find your bearings. The rooms are rather standard, but accessible enough to please lazy dads (flat screen TV with loads of channels), businessmen (plenty of space to hang your shirts) and a room service option for people who can’t quite move from the comfortable beds.
But chances are you won’t be spending too long in your room, anyway, especially with the luxury Green Rooms spa, complete with public gym, swimming pool, steam room and treatment centre. This is attached to the hotel, but don’t expect too much privacy. It’s clearly a destination point in itself, with affordable treatments aimed at everybody and their mother (a half hour back, neck and shoulder aromatherapy massage is £25 and well worth it; a mini facial is the same price, and they also offer scrubs and wraps, hot stones, tanning, pedicures, waxing and all other associated remedies). And we can vouch for the pool - it’s warm and really rather lovely.
The function rooms and facilities for conferences are vast and thriving, but we don’t get the full scale of our hotel’s attendance until dinner time in the Greenhouse Restaurant, shared with a busy number of occupants while a wedding party celebrate in the garden. It creates a jovial atmosphere to enjoy a superb Cumbrian tasting menu - the proud creation of head chef Justin Woods, who actively supports British farming and only uses local sources, and being in Cumbria, these sources are particularly more abundant than your average British county - the starter of smoked produce (chicken, duck, salmon and cheese) is smoked at the Cartmel Valley Smokehouse, just 15 miles from Kendal, and so it continues: the pork is from Wigton’s Black Brow Farm, 48 miles from Kendal (maybe slightly too far to be realistically described as ‘local’), the cheese and yoghurt is from the Cumberland Dairy. Woods’ menu may be ethically pleasing, but the taste is just as rewarding - particularly the choice cuts of pork, which is an incredibly versatile dish considering that all of the meat is from the same animal. It’s well presented too, with small but filling portions.
And if you need to walk all of that off, then the whole of Kendal is on your doorstep, with its quaint independent stores, its rolling riverbank and stunning views. We hop on a bus to Windermere and within an hour we’ve climbed Orrest Head to catch possibly the best view over the largest lake in the district. To properly explore Cumbria you’ll need longer than a weekend, and the Castle Green in Kendal is a more than apt location to set up camp.
Best Western Castle Green Hotel, Castle Green Lane, Kendal, Cumbria, LA9 6RG, 01539 734 000, www.castlegreen.co.uk
Posted on Wednesday 2nd September 2009
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