Beautiful self-catering cottages in Cumbria

Keswick self catering holiday let, Lake District, UK

Torn Halves — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 20:13:34 +0000

The Bay Tree is a first-floor holiday flat smack in the centre of keswick – one of the most popular resorts in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK. It has two bedrooms (one kingsize and one twin) to sleep up to four. It also has a lovely open-plan living/dining and cooking area, well-equipped and tastefully furnished and decorated. All of Keswick is on your doorstep and there is room for parking next to the flat. Handy also for the A66, making it a quick journey in from the motorway.

For more details about The Bay Tree self catering holiday let see the site by clicking the link below:

Keswick self catering holiday let, Lake District, UK.

Holiday property website design

Torn Halves — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:19:06 +0000

Stylish and affordable websites designed for holiday property businesses in the UK – holiday cottage, apartment, guest house, villa and vacation rental websites designed for businesses working to a tight budget. Choose from cheaper template based designs or more expensive custom-built websites. Also choose to have the holiday website built with a CMS so you can update and extend the site yourself whenever you want. Extra features for holiday businesses such as availability calendars and booking forms.

To see sample designs and get prices of holiday websites visit Handcrafted Websites.

Cumbria self catering cottages – bargains

Torn Halves — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:11:58 +0000

4 - 5 star Cumbria self catering cottages with easy access to the Lake District at bargain basement prices? Possible? Yes.

Hall Hills is slashing its prices for the winter so why not book a cut-price holiday cottage in a lovely part of Cumbria?

For details of the holiday cottages see Hall Hills self catering, Cumbria.

Horizon Sky self catering apartments Turkey

Torn Halves — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:07:23 +0000

Two lovely new self catering apartments at the brand spanking new and fully-equipped Horizon Sky beach resort in Turkey. The resort is close to Gulluk and Bodrum. They are fully equipped for self catering holiday accommodation and have great views of the Med. One apartment sleeps 2 – 4 and the other 4 – 6.

See Horizon Sky self catering apartments for more details, prices and bookings.

Llandovery, Brecon Beacons, Carmarthenshire Holiday Cottage – Sleeps 8

Torn Halves — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:21:28 +0000

A new holiday cottage near Llandovery and the Brecon Beacons in Carmarthenshire, Wales, UK – sleeps 8 adults is open for business. Named Penywaun House it is to be found at http://www.merlincottages.co.uk a site designed by the Web Design Cottage (http://www.webdesigncottage.com)

The cottage sleeps 9 in total (8 adults and room for an extra child) and enjoys a lovely position in north Wales out near Crychan Forest and the Brecon Beacons in Carmarthenshire. An ideal base for a self catering holiday in north Wales and handy for a lot of north Wales attractions including the Brecon Beacons and the charming town of Llandovery.

Self-catering cottage website design

Torn Halves — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:14:57 +0000

An increasing number of self catering holiday cottages are choosing to have their business websites designed and maintained by the Web Design Cottage - a small website design firm based somewhat unexpectedly in rural Greece. Michael Reid – the web designer – comes from Cumbria and retains very close links with the area whose holiday cottages and guest houses he is so interested in helping to promote via websites that are stylishly designed, inexpensive and – most of all – able to achieve a high ranking with Google and the other search engines. The Web Design Cottage prides itself on designing websites that are both inexpensive and have excellent search engine optimisation built in as standard. There is no extra cost for careful optimisation of the key pages on a holiday cottage or guesthouse website. The Web Design Cottage can also help to arrange things such as the installation of an availability calendar or a complete online booking service enabling the automated management of bookings made via credit card. Attractive Flash slideshows and banners can also be included. Although the websites employ templates to keep costs reasonable, each website is carefully customised to ensure that each has the unique look that it deserves.

Self-catering holiday of the year

Torn Halves — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 08:54:08 +0000

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

Torn Halves — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:20:47 +0000

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

Torn Halves — Sat, 09 May 2009 13:50:25 +0000

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

Torn Halves — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:23:00 +0000

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?