The Horn of Plenty

Guests praise the comfortable, spacious rooms with beautiful views and well-equipped bathrooms. The friendly and efficient staff provide exceptional service. The converted buildings offer artful amenities.

Good, but not great. We stayed for dinner, bed and breakfast, and despite much that was above average - well-equipped room with lovely view from south-facing balcony, fabulous dinner, exemplary service in restaurant - the overall experience was diminished by a few oversights/errors/omissions, particularly affecting the ‘guest experience’ within the hotel. For example: at check-in (for which we were 20 mins early) we were sent to the lounge and then forgotten; we weren’t asked at what time we’d like dinner, but told when we finally did check in; our jug of milk in the fridge had a fly in it; and we returned after a day out to find some of our toiletries, including a toothbrush, on the bathroom floor (apparently removed from a shelf when cleaning). All of these issues could have been avoided at no extra cost with more care and consideration for the guest.

We pre-booked the lunch menu as we were in the area for other reasons and this was one of the only places open this time of year. It's really easy to find and the drive up is really beautiful however parking seemed limited. When we arrived we were lead to the drawing room to wait for our table to be ready (we arrived a bit early so this was a nice touch rather than us standing around). The only strange thing was that we were given the menus and our order was taken in the drawing room. Strange but not a big deal. We were then led to our table by the very helpful host. Both hosts on that day were excellent and struck the right balance between checking on us and leaving us alone to eat. As part of the lunch menu you are given some warm bread and water at the start of the meal. The bread was good and was well received as we had been traveling in the morning and hadn't eaten since early in the morning. For starters we both had the Haddock fish cakes. They were really good and the perfect size for a starter. For main I had the chicken breast which was perfectly cooked. It was served with mash, broccoli, caramelised onion puree and a roasted onion. This course was solid cooking and I would 100% have it again. The desert was my favourite part of the meal. We both had the chocolate cremeux with the star of the show being the hazelnuts it was served with. It has a salty hit which was really needed with the rich dessert. It was excellent. The reason it is not 5 stars is purely a few bits we had an issue with. Being January it was pretty quiet and I don't think the staff in the kitchen realised how loud they were being. We could hear some of them swearing which we wouldn't normally care about but when the you are trying to have a nice lunch and the fact it was quiet it was pretty hard to ignore. That said, everyone swears sometimes so not that big of a deal and we would return!