Breakfast at the hotel is a little haphazard, but this is easily forgiven due to the utter splendour of the dining room. True to the claims on their website, the dining room is fitted out with the panelling, columns, fixtures and fittings of the SS Olympia – the Titanic’s twin sister.
It’s truly incredible and has to be seen to be believed – it really does feel like you’re in the fine dining room from an ocean going liner of yesteryear. Opulence and excess would seem to be the general effect they were going for.
Holy Island is by contrast a more simple and bare affair.
It’s one of my favourite places in Britain and as we walk across the island with the sun on our faces and the sweeping wind in our hair I feel myself start to totally relax and open up.
My dodgy foot is playing up a bit, but it would take more pain than that to stop me wanting to walk this beautiful island (btw question for Pab – where does your project’s policy lie re causeway linked islands?).
We catch the low tide again at around 4pm and make it back across the causeway safe and sound.
Longing to get up into the moorland we take the scenic route back to Alnwick heading up into the Cheviots. Clear blue skies and bright sun stay with us all the way - it’s simply beautiful.
Arriving back in Alnwick we decide that we need to experience at least one evening meal in the amazing hotel dining room and so decide to chance a menu that is decidedly uninspiring.
The atmosphere and setting is amazing, but even this cannot really compensate for what follows.
To cut a very long and surreal story short, I would recommend this hotel to anyone – the bedrooms are gorgeous, the dining room is simply stunning, the housekeeping and reception staff lovely and even the Northumbrian music night in the bar was…well…quiet enough to be ignored from the lounge area (which is all one can ask for really). Just don’t eat here.
Well at least not unless you like over-priced bland dishes, vegetables boiled into submission, rancid fruit and appalling service.
Seriously it has to be the worst meal out I have ever experienced – and hey I regularly partake in the culinary doom fest that is a Greenbelt Ops weekend…
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