United kingdom Daily news: Lucknam Park, Wiltshire: Sue Lawley unwinds with golf and good food on a stately break

Senin, 02 Juli 2012

Lucknam Park, Wiltshire: Sue Lawley unwinds with golf and good food on a stately break

Lucknam Park, Wiltshire: Sue Lawley unwinds with golf and good food on a stately break

By Sue Lawley

PUBLISHED: 10:09 EST, 2 July 2012 | UPDATED: 10:09 EST, 2 July 2012

As I write this, I am lying on the chaise longue in my bedroom, looking out over the sweep of the front drive and down an avenue of beech and lime trees to the front gates of my home for the weekend.

The sun is flooding in and the maid has just arrived with freshly squeezed orange juice and home-made shortbread. In 15 minutes the butler will bring round the car and we'll be off to play golf at a nearby course.

This is Lucknam Park in Wiltshire, a hotel that has managed to find a winning combination of the old and the new. It offers the comforts of a long-established country house with the modern sophistications we now demand: an excellent Michelin-starred restaurant and a glorious spa.

Long history: Lucknam was turned into a hotel in 1994 after some two hundred years as a private house

My husband Hugh and I needed all this hedonistic RR to prepare us for one of the most stressful tests in life: moving house.

In your mid-60s you feel you should be settled, with a life of hard work behind you and your family launched. But a decade after downsizing, we have decided to upsize again, to accommodate the generation we had underestimated: the grandchildren.

So this weekend away is a brief respite from the avalanche of organisational detail involved in moving house. If you want to tear yourself away from the comforts of the house and grounds, there are plenty of places to visit nearby.

Peaceful: The spa is situated within the walled garden of the hotel

The city of Bath isn't far away, and Hugh and I headed to Manor House Golf Club at Castle Combe for our round.

Lucknam Park is a kind of hand-me-down stately home, originally built in the 17th Century from the proceeds of a fortune made from Virginian tobacco.

In 1987, Â£3.5 million was lavished on transforming the place into a hotel and it opened as a 42-room retreat in 1994. The house itself could probably do with another facelift soon â€" the shabby-chic soft furnishings are beginning to look a bit passÃ© â€" yet the setting is England at its best.

I had spent the previous month preparing for the Great Move.

Very Abbey: The historic delights of Bath are not far from Lucknam Park

I had taken old broadcasting awards â€" great doorstops made of plastic and cheap metal â€" to the rubbish tip (only to have them returned by a well-meaning neighbour who thought they had been stolen).

It's a cleansing process and all good therapy for the soul but not for the body: that was a task for Lucknam Park, where muscles that ached from bending and lifting were eased back into place.

Here, with a large slab of my history consigned to the bin, I could take stock of what had been and what was yet to come. It was the perfect intermezzo â€" a stolen moment of borrowed luxury stranded between my past and my future.

Travel Facts

Lucknam Park Hotel Spa (01225 742777, www.lucknampark.co.uk) is offering four nights for the price on three until September 30. Rooms start at Â£330 per night based on two sharing, including breakfast and use of the spa. A round of golf at Manor House Golf Club at Castle Combe (01249 783101, www.manorhousegolf.co.uk) costs Â£59.