Romantic cottages for two in the Peak District
Romantic cottages for two in the Peak District
We love dogs, and their owners, and we welcome dogs to Tom’s Barn, warmly and almost unconditionally. However, we do always stipulate ‘well-behaved’ and we do politely suggest that they don’t go upstairs or onto the furniture (unless it is adequately protected by dust sheets and old curtains which we do provide).
So, what is this all leading up to? And, no, we haven’t had a bad experience, not for a long time… What is worrying us is that on Wednesday we are having a carpet laid! Carpet, up the stairs and in the Tom’s Barn bedroom and no… we didn’t really want to do this having always tried as hard as we can to keep our two barns as charmingly ‘barnlike’ as we can rather than what in the circumstances would feel to us to be overdressed and inappropriate.
So what has brought on the astonishing change of mind you may wonder? Well, it’s status seeking, no less, or perhaps, status retaining. As you know, both our barns are annually inspected and given 5 Stars with a coveted Gold Award. In Tom’s Barn this is quite an achievement, accepting dogs as we do (although by no means all our loyal and lovely Tom’s Barn guests have dogs) and we are determined not to risk losing it, nor do we ever want to threaten the pleasure of any guest coming without a dog. At our last QiT (Quality in Tourism) inspection we were warned in no uncertain terms that to retain our Five Star status we had to do something about the wooden surface of both the stairs (bad, thanks to occasional sharp and slithering dogs’ claws) and the bedroom floor (mostly just general wear and tear and countless moppings but also what can only be the odd doggie claw mark).
We consulted Jason our decorator, David our joiner and various other experts who know about these things, hoping against hope that someone would have an attractive and workable solution. Very very reluctantly we have come to see that short of serious structural and extremely expensive reflooring which anyway would be impossible to achieve with little likelihood of a long enough gap in our wall-to-wall bookings which we can’t disrupt the only reasonable solution is what we hope will be attractive and hard-wearing carpet.
So three burly carpet layers from Nutts Carpets of Clay Cross are coming on Wednesday to lay the carpet. I say burly, but of course they may all be wiry and slim but what we do know is that they will be strong and they will be skilled because they will have to lay the carpet with the enormously heavy bed in situ; they also have the central pillar to work around. It won’t be a simple job. Guests are coming on Friday and everything has got to be spick and span and spotless so the pressure is on for the poor carpet layers and for us.
And once the carpet is down for all sorts of obvious reasons we will not want dogs up the stairs or in the bedroom, please. I know most people wouldn’t dream of letting their dog upstairs, here or at home but we do understand that for some dogs it is difficult: there is no door you can firmly shut and if they can hear and see you upstairs they may find it hard to understand that they aren’t welcome. Fortunately we now have a permanent stair gate and we do ask your cooperation not just for our peace of mind but for all our guests as well, those with dogs and those without.
John this evening took a few before shots of the carpetless wooden surfaces; all being well tomorrow we shall have some after pictures which we will all be happy with!
I am rather proud of the fact that despite advancing years and general lack of ‘coolness’ we have been on Facebook for over three years. What isn’t quite so impressive is that in those 3 plus years I have done very, very little and have tended only to respond to others rather than initiate anything positive (rather the way I am with LinkedIn now, but I keep meaning to get to grips with that, too).
The pressure is now on. With apparently half the population of Great Britain on Facebook alone, never mind Twitter and all the others, one just has to accept that social networking is part of life already, just as email has become, and mobile phones and whatever else is in store for the future. We have been waking up to this in our little part of the world, helped enormousy by wonderfully inspirational training provided, free at the moment (thanks to European funding) by the ebusiness club which is run mainly I think by the East Midlands Chamber of Commerce for all small/medium sized businesses in the East Midlands.
Not surprisingly, the funding situation is becoming very insecure so we all tend to go to as many relevant sessions as possible while the going is good! The workshops and seminars are all designed to help what may be fairly isolated small businesses keeping up with website design and optimisation, online marketing, social media, wireless and mobile working etc. Most of the Peak District Premier Cottages owners have made full use of all that’s on offer and we have all benefitted enormously.
The emphasis on social marketing has struck home and as a group we have decided all to develop a Facebook page for our own properties, but we also have started our own Peak District Premier Cottages page which is building up slowly. Do please have a look! And while you are on Facebook, please have a look at our Tom’s Barn and Douglas’s Barn one as well and if you are that way inclined, please do ‘Like’ us as well.
Our terrific webman Jeremy Blough has worked hard in not very much time to design our Welcome page which is meant to reflect the feel of our website… Any comments, suggestions and (gently worded) citicisms will be gratefully accepted. We know we have a lot to learn.
Tom's & Douglas's Barns and our guests - the heart of it all
There I was early this morning at Derby’s Pride Park stadium overlooking the football pitch, all ears, concentrating intently. No, I wasn’t watching a football match although one day I perhaps should; rather, I was hoping fervently to pick up some tips from Liam Lally, today’s E-Business club trainer at their Breakfast Briefing for today, ‘Blogging for Business’.
The briefing was as predictably helpful and stimulating as these seminars always are and I did indeed pick up many tips (and many ‘don’t dos’) which I won’t list here but would happily share with any colleagues or friends interested. One warning though was to avoid wriitng a blog if one didn’t like writing and didn’t feel a ‘passion’ for the subject. I came away realising how lucky I am: I have always enjoyed writing so that is no problem and I can take no credit for it, and John and I absolutely love our ‘job’ running Tom’s and Douglas’s Barns, and all the happy links and memories with our guests and friends that we have been privileged to enjoy over the years. You seem to love coming here, and we love having you. So writing as it were to all of you on the blog has always felt very natural and right, rather like an extended correspondence with a really good friend, about simply anything that comes to mind that might just conceivably interest them but loosely at the heart of it all, is the shared link with Tom’s and Douglas’s Barns.
At that rate, we are doing extremely well, but we would appreciate more responses, so please start commenting even more!
There is a problem though. One hopes the friend would reply, occasionally, and occasionally and rewardingly the friend does but as I confided to Liam afterwards when I went up to reveal my identity (the blushes had started subsiding by then, keep reading…) that not as often as we had hoped. I did feel reassured when he told me that if one wrote one blog post a day for 365 days one could expect one comment a year! So there’s a challenge…
But before we get bogged down with challenges – why the blush? And if Jeremy Brough our wonderful web guru/friend had been there he should have taken nearly all the credit when what should appear on the screen as the last slide of the morning but the front page of our Tom’s Barn Blog!!! Liam presented it as a good example of a local blog. It came so totally out of the blue I felt very startled and really did find myself going a deep purple to the consternation of some of the people on my table who had absolutely no idea why. I was so overcome I don’t even remember all that he said, except that it did seem to be quite complimentary.
This rather beautiful water lily on our pond is the nearest we could get to a lotus – a wonderful gleam of light in the dark…
With all the current gloom and financial doom it feels – it is – all the more important to have some some easily afforded self-indulgent treats to look forward to in the what well may be excessively dreary months ahead. And now at last you can again, on a whim, in the middle of the night, without having to make any contact with anyone…book a holiday here, the thought of which may help keep you plodding on towards 2012 with your chin up and a gleam in your eye.
We all love to go abroad (and just wait till we tell you where our daughter Ruthie is going next week). Sadly we can’t all do wonderful cruises to exotic places as somebody else’s guest, and anyway there’s not too much chance of a cruise in the land-locked Peak District but we can do our best to provide the opportunity for a wonderfully relaxing and peaceful holiday with beautiful scenery, wonderful walks, excellent pubs and restaurants – and Chatsworth and Haddon on the doorstep.
Holidaying in this country need hardly be a penance: no ghastly injections or anti-malarial pills, you are unlikely to need to use an airport, you won’t waste half your week getting over jet-lag, you are equally unlikely to get some ghastly foreign tummy-bug or have (total) difficulty making yourself understood and you may even find some of the scenery as beautiful as any (even Lord Byron said of Dovedale that one needn’t bother going to Swtzerland when such beauty was to be found here.)
Anyway, what I am building up to say is that – and not before time – I have put next year’s prices onto our 2012 booking calendar, so at long last if you are booking for next year you won’t meet with a blank wall implying we have gone out of business or are fully booked but actually only meaning that we had been extremely slow to get oursleves organised. So, all those that have already booked must be complimented for their persistence and from now on it should be easier.
Also, I should have added, that although all the 2012 prices have had to go up qiuite considerably, all holidays booked this year go at the current 2011 rate (and of course, if you have stayed here before, you get another (roughly) 5% off so it gets cheaper and cheaper.
It is hard from the outside to make our two lovely holiday cottages in the Peak District look anything other than what they once were – cattle barns on a working farm!
Orchard Farm is not a listed building – in spite of its age and general loveliness (beauty they say is in the eye of the beholder) it is not deemed of any great architectural merit by the powers-that-be. However, we are in the Peak National Park and we are in a Conservation Area so there were many restrictions imposed when we converted the barns, many but not all of which we understood and accepted. After some ‘discussions’ the planners did accept that our guests would need some daylight upstairs and they agreed to our choce of colour for the woodwork instead of their originally stipulated ‘black or drak brown’.
Crucially, our romantic cottages for two had to stay looking like barns from the outside, however romantic/contemporary the internal modernisation…
Other than that, all we could do to suggest that they are no longer cattle sheds is to put pots of flowers outside! So, when it comes to producing enticing external photos for websites and the Premier Cottages brochure we are a bit stumped to make them look in the slightest bit inviting, or suggestive that inside might be quite exciting and fun!
John and Jeremy Brough our webman/friend have nearly fallen out of upstairs windows with me clinging to their legs as they try to get a moderately enticing shot (see the first photo, taken by John). A couple of years ago Jeremy also happily allowed himself to be strapped to a pallet on our neighbour Mick’s ‘cherry picker’, gamely aiming his camera above his head as he swayed and wavered in the breeze up high (see his photo of Orchard Farm on the left).
Last Sunday Mark Nunnerley took several excellent shots with his camera on top of a pole; he meanwhile had both feet safely on the ground as he directed his camera via his laptop. Both sets of guests were game enough to allow themselves to be included in the shots, as they sat outside in the sunshine studying maps and drinking cups of tea (it was too early for the wine that came later). So our barns still look like barns in his photos but one can also see signs of life and also one can see our rural village setting, with open countryside immediately behind.
Mark Nunnerley sent six photos which you can see in our blog photo gallery; there are also two that John took of Mark taking them. See what you think. We are very pleased with them; so a big thank you to Mark and also a big thank you to our involuntary ‘extras’ who were staying last week! By the way, all the photos look better if you click on each one to enlarge it.
Our local Peak District Premier Cottages group of ‘the very best 4 and 5 star holiday cottage owners’ locally are setting up a very exciting scheme of discounted prices for our guests at various appropriate local attractions, products and restaurants.
Each set of guests will be find a laminated ‘privilege card’ on their set of keys while they are staying, which they will show to the relevant destination to receive the price discount, free pudding etc… The scheme is already up and running although the list is still growing; I have put it up now on a new page within the Tom’s Barn and Douglas’s Barn Facebook site which I can keep updating but you can also click on this link to see the current version from the Peak District Premier Cottages Facebook page.
I already know that Haddon Hall is starting in the autumn (when their tills have been re-calibrated to cope with this special situation) and Sally Mosley’s Guided Walks are offering a 10% discount off her walks which will make them even more enticing and there are numerous other concessions in the pipeline.
“The Peak District Environmental Quality Mark (EQM) is a pioneering award for businesses that contribute to the conservation and enhancement of the Peak District National Park”…and “only businesses that can demonstrate high standards of environmental management…can qualify for the award”!
So, as you can imagine, we were very delighted to hear that we have been successful. It certainly was a very rigorous procedure, and the most recent group of us were the first to pilot the new online application form. With all the links and ready access to relevant information online it apparently was more demanding than the old paper application but it is easy to claim that!
With the process being new we were officially testing the new version and there were some interesting snags thrown up which all appeared to be quickly resolved. Now the next step is the EQM Awards evening with dinner at Haddon Hall! Rather typically this comes the evening of the day (Thursday 16th) next week that the Friends of the DRCS are hosting a charity lunch for 120 in the new village hall at Over Haddon! We’ll be glad of what I am sure will be a lovely evening.
For the first time since February last year (when we withdrew Tom’s Barn from availability for ten days while it was completely redecorated) and – oh yes – another sudden illness cancellation in March lst year (when we moved in for a break oursleves!) Tom’s Barn lies empty!! It doesn’t feel right, and of course for the guests who had been looking forward to their week booked a year ago it is very disappointing and sad that they had to cancel.
With due warning we can pretty well guarantee that we’ll be able to relet a spell , but with only one day’s warning we weren’t so lucky. Nobody took up the offer of a week at slightly under half price although we have had a number of frustrated responses from people who would have loved to had not such a thing intervened…so now we are offering a midweek break this Monday 23rd to Friday 27th at £225 (it simply isn’t worth our while letting it for less).
If we are lucky enough to re-let the spell, we will credit the guests-that-cancelled with it, towards their next holiday here. We are able to do that as they have already paid us for it, and they fortunately had taken out insurance. We certainly don’t want to benefit by their misfortune so it would be lovely to be able to let them benefit in a little way themselves. However, at this stage it doesn’t look very promising.
The current excitement in our world if not yet in the birds’ world, is a brand new nesting box, complete with wi-fi camera, recently bought from the RSPB shop at Carsington. We’ve been promising ourselves one ever since we had so much interest and enjoyment last year watching the blue tits in our (camera-less) nesting box under under the plum tree.We’re a bit late in the season, as the first batch are all happily nesting already but we are hoping that perhaps we may catch the attention of a second lot although deep down we know it will probably not be until next year at the earliest.
Whilst we know this, there is still the wild hope that one day soon we will turn on the television and find we are looking at a nest; at present we stare into a bright and horribly pristine wooden box. with absolutely nothing in it at all. The new box is up on the shed wall opposite the house and visible from both barns. Only a few feet away from the brand new box a pair of blue tits is very happily nesting in a hole in the wall, which is probably far cosier and certainly more private. John captured some shots of them yesterday, three of which are here. You can see these and many more on our Photo Gallery.
We had long been planning, although somewhat dreamily, about updating the side tables and bedside cabinets in Tom’s Barn. They were all part of the original furniture eleven years ago when Tom’s Barn was born; they had seen good service but even eleven years ago were not exactly from the toppest of ‘top drawers.
Our dream were rapidly forced into reality when the last inspector agreed all too readily with our suggestion that they were due for replacement, and also the easy chair which although still relatively new and expensively upholstered had never recovered from an ‘expert’ dry cleaning by a firm in Sheffield which seemed to do nothing but accentuate any slight marks already there (and why we had it cleaned in the first place)…
We rapidly found a new chair made by a furniture maker in Brailsford, and that has been in the barn for some time now (unfortunately not too visibly in these photo. We also asked a local joiner to make some oak furniture (coffee table, two side tables and two bedside cabinets). The six weeks we were quoted stretched into about ten, but never mind, handmade and all looking brilliant they arrived today – so we hadn’t been dreaming all along, after all…!
Fortunately it was changeover day, so in went the new stuff, and out came the old. And guess where it went? All to our house!! We are always quite happy with the cast-offs, and can guarantee they’ll be comfortable even if past their sell-by date.
A few of John’s photos are here but for masses more taken by John this afternoon, look at our gallery.
I have had the pleasure of managing Tom and Douglas Barns for 10 Years and felt it was time to enjoy a bit more of my retirement. The barns will continue to be holiday cottages and will be maintained to the standard that all previous guests have enjoyed. The only change is that Sykes Cottages […]
The weather is a bit mixed but we are still getting sunny days. A perfect time of year to come and stay for a few days and have a walk in the lovely countryside, take a bike ride, visit one of the many attractions that all stay open or just relax in Tom or Douglas […]
The weather has been so wet but our barns offer a cosy retreat in beautiful countryside. Why not pack a bag for a few days and have a break . We have extended our spring prices until mid June and reduced our summer prices. It would be lovely to see you for a few days […]
