Making a Pig of myself

We should have been in Majorca this week where it’s 23 degrees and sunny. Instead, due to unforeseen circumstances, we spent a few days in Somerset where it was 13 degrees and overcast with a hint of drizzle.

Fear not, it wasn’t a hardship because we stayed at Hunstrete House, aka The Pig hotel near Bath. According to the Telegraph, ‘Pig hotels are all about dining and drinking and this is no exception. The country garden food and respectfully hedonistic atmosphere are what keep people returning to the Grade II-listed country house’.

This was our second visit to a Pig hotel. The first was in the summer when we had dinner at the original Pig hotel in the New Forest. Today there are nine, from Cornwall to Kent, with a further two in the offing.

Hunstrete House is a Georgian lodge dating from 1820 on the edge of a deer park. In the 18th century there were plans for a much larger ‘grand mansion’ but although work on the project started it was later abandoned, and what had been constructed was then demolished, leaving only a line of arches that still exist. (Seen from a distance they look like a railway viaduct, suggesting the ‘grand mansion’, had it been completed, would have been huge.)

Until the 1970s Hunstrete House was a family home but since then it’s been a hotel, joining The Pig family in 2014. Inside there’s a bar, drawing room, and conservatory restaurant. Outside there’s a large kitchen garden, plus hen coops, bee hives, and a mushroom house. Most of the food is sourced on site or locally.

There are 31 bedrooms including ‘characterful hideaways’ in the garden, some with freestanding baths, others with log burners. We stayed in a room in a converted stable in the small courtyard directly adjacent to the main house. Guests included a young French family, but it was largely couples enjoying a short break.

I do love a good country house hotel so my ambition is to stay at every Pig hotel, but that may take a while so don’t hold your breath.