I’ve found Brigadoon – just outside Newcastle
The Lord Crewe Arms
‘I FEEL as though we’re in Brigadoon,’ said a delighted guest in the atmospheric crypt bar. Like the remote, enchanted settlement in the musical, there is something magical about the tiny village of Blanchland and its venerable hotel.
Blanchland (population 80-100) – part of the North Pennines – is an isolated huddle of honeycoloured stone buildings nestling in a hollow in the rugged moors 25 miles south-west of Newcastle. It feels cut off from the rest of the country and the 21st Century.
The place is dripping in history. An abbey was founded here in the 12th Century and what is now the Lord Crewe Arms hotel was built as the abbot’s lodge, guesthouse and kitchens, becoming an inn in the 18th Century.
It has been visited by kings, raided by Scots, and has links to the Jacobite rebellion. W. H. Auden stayed here in 1930, ordering champagne in the vaulted bar. Almost 25 years later he wrote in a travel article that ‘no other spot brings me sweeter memories’. The Lord Crewe has two eating areas: a medieval dining room with a vast stone fireplace, and, upstairs, the airy, smarter restaurant overlooking the garden. Breakfast is served here and in winter you can watch daylight slowly creeping across the moors.
There are plenty of crackling fires, beams, sloping floors and uneven stone stairways throughout the hotel.
But for all its cosiness and old world charm, it is bang up to date too, with good wi-fi and Nespresso machines in the rooms (along with cookies and delicious Cumbrian fudge). Brigadoon appears for only one day every 100 years but, happily, you can find your way to Blanchland at any time.
USP: Its atmosphere. There is an almost tangible sense of the past, enhanced by the remoteness of the location.
Rooms: There are 21, across the main abbey building, an adjacent square of former lead miners’ cottages, and an old inn. All are furnished in a clean, rustic style.
Food: A three-course dinner costs from £30. My main – pan-fried grey mullet with cockle butter – was spectacular. I’d also recommend the ‘Canny Northumberland Breakfast’ – ‘canny’ meaning excellent in the local vernacular – which includes bacon, sausages and meltingly gorgeous black pudding. Neil Armstrong