A few miles and several dozen decibels from Stansted Airport, this well-appointed country hotel is a whisper-quiet retreat perched in a hundred-odd acres of Essex woodland. It’s more hotel with a spa than a spa hotel, with its small wet spa and treatment rooms a treat for a couple of hours’ soaking weary bones in the hydrotherapy pool, sweating away stress in the sauna and taking in a massage or two, but less handy for the kind of spa all-dayer that’d see you emerge with Buddha-like levels of zen and probably skint.
Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. Just head back to the hotel next door and settle into the kind of grand tearoom ‘Downton Abbey’’s Crawley family would happily call home and order a G&T made with botanicals grown in the Down Hall gardens. The building itself has had a few lives in its time – as a Great War hospital and a manor house – but now its comfy bedrooms and busy brasserie play host to weekending city dwellers, wedding parties and families.
