A night or two in a hotel with children is manageable. You live out of bags, eat every meal out, and get through it. But stretch that to four, five or seven nights and the arithmetic changes completely in cost, in effort, and in how much the trip actually feels like a rest for the […]
A Quiet Base Near Durham (That Doesn’t Feel Like a Compromise)
Quiet and convenient don’t often appear in the same sentence when it comes to accommodation near a city. Usually you get one or the other: peaceful but remote, or well-located but noisy. Plawsworth Hall is genuinely both, and it’s worth explaining what that actually means in practice. The village Plawsworth is a small village, around […]
Which Plawsworth cottage or apartment suits your group?
When people ring us about availability, they almost always lead with how many of them there are. It’s a reasonable place to start and it’s rarely the thing that decides it. Who’s sharing with whom matters more. Four people can mean two adults and two children, or four adults who’d all quite like their own […]
Staying at Plawsworth with a baby or toddler
The single most useful thing we can tell you before you book: we’ll lend you a travel cot, but we ask that you bring the cot bedding yourself. That catches people out more than anything else, usually at about eight o’clock on the first evening. So we’d rather say it plainly ahead of your stay […]
You’re Not Booking a Listing. You’re Booking a Managed Property
The short-term rental market has made it easier than ever to find somewhere to stay. It’s also made “self-catering accommodation” mean almost anything. A spare room with a kitchenette. A flat managed by an agency three cities away. A cottage where the key is in a lockbox and you’re on your own from check-in to […]
Durham Book Festival: planning a trip from outside the city
Durham Book Festival runs from Friday 9 to Sunday 11 October this year, and it’s one of the oldest literary festivals in the country. A long weekend of authors, ideas and conversation spread across venues in the centre of Durham. If you’re coming from further afield, the accommodation question tends to get decided before the […]
