Hindle Pastures B&B...
Award winning Guest House offering tranquil Guest accommodationTELEPHONE: 01706 643310
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Hindle Pastures gains silver award
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Sunday Times
Michelin on the cheap
The famous red guides have begun to reward affordable hospitality.
Brian Schofield in the south Pennines
FIRST, THE bad news. Michelin has found only 65 out- standing small hotels with prices under the qualifying level (£65 for a double room) in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland. We could be optimistic and assume this is because it’s the first year of the Bib Hôtel award. Or we could be honest and view it as an outright criticism of the bald carpets, purple wallpaper and vacant receptionists that characterise a fair slice of UK budget hospitality.
The inspectors have been more generous to our restaurants, conferring 114 Bib Gourmand awards (places that serve three courses, minus wine, for about £25); but given that they gave out 350 in France last year, it seems our value dining industry has also failed to match its continental cousins’.
For now at least, those searching for the best of British must head for a few designated pockets of affordable excellence. Suffolk has plenty of Bibs, as do Devon and the Scottish Borders. But I chose to review the reviewers in a small cluster of Bib-toting restaurants and hotels in the atmospheric old mill towns and hilltop villages of the south Pennines.
Between beds and dinners, I toured the beautiful moorlands and quiet, under visited valleys that survive between the northern towns of Halifax and Rochdale.
Visiting the southern Pennines can feel like a leap of faith, because when the map indicates you are only a few miles from your hoped-for lovely weekend, the windscreen is still full of the bookmakers, burger bars and “urban regeneration projects” of north-west Greater Manchester. Then the road starts to climb, and the old houses progress from mill workers’ to mill owners’ to upland farmers’. The moors open up, the narrow, wooded valleys roll away and the gnawing lifestyle envy kicks in.
Just such a climb brings you to Hindle Pastures (01706 643310, www.hindlepastures.co.uk; doubles from £50), a wonderfully converted barn that backs onto moorland high up and away from Rochdale. It is designed with real style and managed with informal, chatty ease by Gill Marshall.
Gill prepares dinners on request ( from £13), but it’s her lavish cooked breakfasts that account for the fierce competition for bookings. I suppose it’s unlikely that Michelin will ever confer a culinary star upon a full English, but I’d encourage them to make an exception here. Hindle Pastures certainly glides past my personal B&B test — it would make a good weekend out of a distant wedding — with lovely walking, cycling and even riding (Hindle Pastures accepts equine guests).A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests that a long weekend at Hindle Pastures, with two romantic dinners at Ramsons, then the Millbank, could cost a couple just £97 each, plus wine and tips. Trust me, that’s a bargain.
