Self-catering holiday of the year

Another surprising win! After being named self-catering holiday of the year by Cumbria Tourism in the Spring of 2009, Hall Hills has now been given the award for self-catering holiday of the year for the North-West of England. The result of the competition was announced in Blackpool on Monday September 28.

The competition in the self-catering category was very stiff – so stiff in fact that Jude and Tim Walker (the proprietors) went to Blackpool thinking that there was really nothing else to do but just enjoy the evening. So they were completely bowled over when it was announced that they were the winners.

Nest stop: the national competition organised by Enjoy England.

We wish them luck.

Northwest Self-Catering Holiday Cottage Competition

Hall Hills self-catering cottages by the Lake District are through to the northwest of England regional final of the self-catering holiday of the year competition.

As winners of Cumbria Tourism’s Self-Catering Holiday of the Year for 2009 award they have automatically entered for the even more stringent competition. The entry procedures – and they are lengthy – have been completed and we now await the announcement of the result in Blackpool in September. We wish Hall Hills well.

Self-catering holiday of the year in Cumbria, 2009

Hall Hills has been chosen as Cumbria’s self-catering holiday of the year for 2009. This is a huge (and very pleasant surprise) for a small and a new business faced with such steep competition. Monkhouse and Waitby must have dismissed Hall Hills as an also-ran but in the end it was Hall Hills that got the call to the podium. Now they automatically go through to the competition for the best self-catering holiday in the north west of England.

Keswick Romantics

Visitors to Keswick, the overwhelming majority of whom stay in Keswick’s famous guest houses, follow in the footsteps of the Romantic pioneers of the 18th century – people like John Dalton (1709-1763) and John Brown (1715-1766). Dalton certainly doesn’t fit the preconceived notion of the Romantic as a sophisticated southerner nauseated by an industrialising city. He was the son of the rector of Dean near Cockermouth. Brown also grew up in a religious family in Cumbria (Carlisle) and also had literary ambitions, and both wrote about the Lakeland landscape with an unprecedented veneration. Brown paid an annual visit to Keswick, seeing it “not as an idle amusement but as a religious act.” In his description the waterfalls in the Lakes tumble “in vast sheets from rock to rock in rude and terrible magnificence,” and the clouds are pierced by fell tops “where mortal foot never yet approached.” He described a trip to Walla Crag, where the “broken steeps form an immense and awful picture,” in contrasted to a later walk to Derwentwater by moonlight, “a scene of such delicate beauty, repose and solemnity as exceeds all description.”

Dalton’s Descriptive Poem in 1755 and Brown’s Letter describing the Vale and Lake of Keswick in 1767 show a fascination with the sublime – a fascination with what is immense, stupendous, somewhat menacing and savage. There is a curious pleasure felt when confronted by a natural scene that humbles the viewer – that reminds him of human frailty and powerlessness, and of the crushing power of Nature. Dalton saw nature in all its savagery and called it “a pleasing, though an awful sight.”

Brown analysed what drew him to the scenery around Keswick and identified three qualities: beauty, horror and immensity. To the visitor who has just parked his car in the car park and walked past the man from the National Trust with his green Land Rover trying to sell subscriptions, these early references to horror must seem a little far-fetched. But it is a common theme in the writings of early travellers making their pilgrimage to a landscape that is almost holy. Another 18th century visitor from Newcastle went to Friar’s Crag and described the view across Derwentwater to Borrowdale as “beauty lying in the lap of horror.”

Part of the attraction in the awful beauty of nature is the way it spurs the imagination; and the imagination tends to add greatly to what is seen. Here is John Housman describing a walk in October 1798. Nearing the summit, his party were astonished to see “a boiling sea of mountains, with pointed, conical and broken tops…rioting over each other in a most turbulent manner like a legion of raging monsters preparing to spread desctruction on every side.” At the top they were then impressed by the “horror” of the final ridge and the “profound precipice…chasms of enormous depth…steeps of slaty shiver.” One would think this was an ascent in the Himalayas, but no, it was just a stroll up Skiddaw on an autumn day.

One wonders how much of this sense of the sublime remains and how diminshed the chances of feeling it are, now that the area has all been fenced off and declared a National Park. Can anything within the boundaries of a National Park ever really seem to be sublime?

Web design services for guest houses in Keswick, Cumbria

Over the past year or so the team behind the Hall Hills web site have built up a fair amount of experience building web sites and promoting them. they have been especially successful getting the web site for self-catering cottages in Cumbria to rise quite dramatically up the Google rankings. With their recently acquired skills and experience they have decided to offer their services to guest houses in Keswick. The rumour from a Cumbria tourism workshop is that guest houses are not finding it easy to get a presence on the web at an affordable price. That suggested to our team that there was a niche market for their services. Guest houses are the most popular form of holiday accommodation in Keswick – far more popular than the local hotels. They offer bed and breakfast but as guest houses they have to comply with higher standards of service than the smaller BnBs. Hence the plan to target Keswick guest houses and offer cut price web packages taking advantage of the fact that our web design service for Keswick is based in eastern Europe where costs are much lower. In addition to designing web sites for the guest houses we have also created a web site dedicated to promoting guest houses in Keswick - a site which guest houses can be listed on for a very reasonable annual fee. Admittedly, this is not the best time to be setting up a new business, but the prospects for guest houses look surprisingly positive. Those who cannot afford to go abroad on holiday are likely to choose to holiday in their home country, and the English Lake District, where Keswick is situated, is probably the most attractive corner of this “green and pleasant land”, and guest houses will continue to be the first choice for people needing good quality affordable holiday accommodation.