Tetbury and Bath

A colleague and I hosted a press trip to Tetbury and Bath to promote our Just Relax campaign. We took the journalists for lunch at The Trouble House Inn – a Michelin-starred pub on the way to Tetbury, Gloucestershire where we had some really inventive dishes in a cosy environment and didn’t want to leave. 

The weather was terrible, so we went straight to our hotel, the gorgeous Calcot Manor, a former English farmhouse set around a pretty courtyard of lime trees and ancient stone barns and stables. The rooms were beautiful and the service welcoming and helpful. We were there to try the spa, which was the only way to spend a rainy afternoon – soaking in the 8-seater outdoor hot tub set in a decked area in front of a blazing log fire, half an hour swim and an Aromaflex massage, which was part deep tissue back massage/part reflexology. We had dinner in the hotel’s fine dining restaurant, The Conservatory, which all agreed was superb.

We popped into the Priory Inn on our way through Tetbury, a three-star family hotel with a popular restaurant serving good pub food and wood-fired pizza, with an emphasis on provenance and local ingredients.

On to Bath after that and we checked into the five star Macdonald Bath Spa hotel, which had just come out of an 18-month, £10million refurbishment. The hotel is beautiful although the rooms were slightly inconsistent – perhaps not all the refurb was complete when we stayed. The new £3m spa was worth a visit, but slightly hectic as there was no spa manager and the atmosphere was a bit chaotic – maybe needs a few months to bed in. 

We visited the stunning new Thermae Bath Spa and loved the space-age steam pods, the roof top pool and the more traditional Cross Bath.

The weekend we were in Bath, we were lucky enough to see the lovely Rupert Penry-Jones (Adam from Spooks) filming a new ITV adaptation of Persuasion, out in this month (March). We had lunch in the Pump Room, where they filmed and joined an informative Jane Austen walking tour of Bath. Dinner was in a private alcove at the Hole in the Wall – great food and a really buzzy restaurant.

For more information on Bath visit the website of Bath Tourism