The Samling sits cradled in a bowl of Lakeland fellside, looking out over panoramic lake views, south along Windermere and west towards the Coniston Old Man mountain range.

It holds a beautifully varied mix of old deciduous woodland, fellside, traditional hay meadows, vegetable gardens and beehives, and a highly unique ornamental garden featuring ingenious water features and interlocking cascading ponds carved from the hillside’s bedrock. These channel the local springs under and around the hotel and down to the lake.

Wordsworth had a romantic dalliance by our stream, (he enjoyed it so much he wrote a poem about it).

The woodland is a haven to wildlife and plant species, including swathes of English Bluebells, birds, and surprisingly exotic looking moths. The variety of the wildlife has a concentrated interest in the rest of the garden – particularly the vegetable gardens, and sometimes they win, enjoying the best efforts of the gardeners demonstrating an adventurous taste for more exotic micro greens than they find in the woods.

The ornamental gardens and water feature are particularly intriguing. We have a listed Georgian stone Summer House that looks along the length of lake Windermere, but we don’t know the age of the intricately devised water systems – as they run under the buildings common sense dictates they were built as part of the plan.

Our old fashioned hay meadows provided happy grazing for our bees, housed in hives on the edge of the old orchards, where the deer left their young to shelter in the long grass last Summer.

It’s a peaceful haven, the man who picked this spot to build The Samling was a man of unerring discretion and we’re grateful to him.