What a year...
After Anne’s beautiful health and well-being blog comes my hard cold muddy and back to nature blog…
It is hard to believe that a year has passed since we sold the Royal Castle and the Royal Seven Stars on the 11th February 2020.
And hasn’t that year flown!! And how lucky are Anne and I. Our feeling of displacement at The Luttrell Arms and The Porlock Weir Hotel being closed is nothing compared to the suffering felt by so many people.
It was the first time in over 30 years that I hadn’t worked a Christmas day so a long walk and a quiet very late lunch in our family bubble was perfect.
This slight feeling of gloom I put down to all the grey days and my inability to do even basic DIY around the house. Anne came back from her visit to The Luttrell Arms with a coat hook and asked me to put it up… Two weeks later I have raw plugs, a drill borrowed from our son, but can’t find two screws. The vine eyes (Hooks) I put into the end wall of the house and stretched wires across to tie in our pyracanthas during the summer have somehow parted company with the wall and earlier in the week I was greeted with the pyracanthas arching onto the ground! The birds had eaten all the berries and it has had an early spring prune and doesn’t need any support!!!
Looking forward we have snowdrops out in the garden in mid Devon and some early blowsy bright yellow daffodils on the bank outside and lots of green shoots. I am so impressed with my gardening abilities I am thinking about a green house!!
The garden at The Luttrell Arms is shaping up for the summer with a new gardener in charge, and we are waiting for the weather to dry up before we can complete the landscaping at The Porlock Weir Hotel garden. We are also trying to plan for reopening but I am not sure when that will be. I started a bit of a sweepstake on the Facebook page and we are tentatively taking bookings from the 1st of April. You can rest assured that if we are not able to open then we will happily move any bookings to new dates or you can cancel for free.
Whenever we do reopen we will be fielding a first class team, we have been keeping everyone engaged with personal phone calls, group chats and staff forums, and we have been trying to communicate more with the wider group of our customers via social media. If you don’t already follow us, please have a look next time you are scrolling through. I know Michell’s cottage industry of Wicks and Anchor is going well.
The countdown to re-opening...
When we reopen we are looking to improve customer service and Covid security by using more technology. We hope you will be able to order drinks at your table and have more personal space in our new garden pods in both hotels. We have improved the management of non-resident customers and of course have a first class management team. We thank our lucky stars that The Luttrell Arms and The Porlock Weir Hotel are the two hotels we chose to keep. The much more rural location of both hotels and more alfresco space to use and with all of Exmoor at our back door, we have some built in natural social distancing.
Please don’t leave it too long before you visit us…I am finding my confined social bubble a little too isolated and as soon as Mr Johnson says so we will be up and welcoming people back!
