Bovey Castle

Bovey Castle

A few miles deep into Dartmoor National Park, where the moor meets the ancient wooded valleys of the River Bovey, an Edwardian Jacobean manor has been running as a country house hotel since 1930, when Great Western Railways turned it into a destination for London weekenders willing to ride the train all the way to Devon. Built in 1907 by Frederick Smith, son of W.H. Smith, conscripted into service as a convalescent home in the First World War and a military hospital in the Second, restored and rechristened Bovey Castle in 2003, the building is one of those grand stone piles with mullioned windows, lavish staircases, and stone fireplaces that don't need to apologise for any of it, holding 60 bedrooms within the manor house and mews, plus 22 three-storey self-catering lodges scattered through 275 acres of estate. This is a full-service English country house hotel in the most traditional sense, an 18-hole championship golf course designed by J.F. Abercromby, an Art Deco indoor pool tucked into the Orangery, the Elan Spa working with Temple Spa products, an Oak Bar lined with 130 whiskies and the kind of sloe gin decanter on your bedside table that tells you immediately what sort of place you've checked into. Two restaurants run the food, the Great Western for proper afternoon tea between one and four and grown-up dinners, Smith's Brasserie for something more relaxed. There are robes and slippers and ESPA toiletries in every room. Children are welcomed everywhere, family swim hours run nine to five in the pool, and one medium dog is allowed in the smaller rooms, two in the bigger ones. What Bovey Castle is exceptionally good at is being everything to everyone in a family, all at once. Falconry, archery, clay pigeon shooting, fly fishing on the river, horse riding across the moor, hot air balloons in the early morning, art classes, the Bovey Rangers programme for children, gliding lessons, rock climbing, eighteen holes before lunch. The estate is large enough that a family of six with different ages and different appetites for adventure can disperse for the day and reconvene for dinner with stories. North Bovey village, all thatch and thirteenth-century cottages, is a twenty-minute walk along the river. Chagford, increasingly one of the most interesting food towns in the country, is ten minutes by car. You should not come if you want something small, intimate, or unmistakably of this moment. You should come if you want classic British grandeur with the spa, the pool, the cocktail bar, the golf, and the children's programme all running quietly in the background, and the moor itself waiting just past the gates whenever you are ready to walk into it. The short version: A grand Edwardian country house hotel in the middle of Dartmoor with 60 keys, 22 lodges, an 18-hole golf course, spa, Art Deco pool, and the full English-resort programme of falconry to fly fishing, run with old-fashioned competence on a 275-acre estate.