Often when guests are checking out they tell us how much they enjoyed the music at dinner, or over breakfast, even if they don’t necessarily recognise anything, but it was nice to have something interesting on in the background. […]
Like all the larger Dales hostels: Malham, Linton, Ingleton, Stainforth, Dentdale, Aysgarth, Grinton Lodge and later Haworth and Hawes, Kettlewell owed much of its success from the mid-twentieth century to reliable regular bookings by school parties especially, though not exclusively, from the northern towns. […]
The new hostel, Whernside House, was purchased late in 1942 for £1,850, with the deeds passing to the YHA Trust on 20th February1943. Colin Hare’s book A Walk around Kettlewell describes how the property had been specially built about 1915 (another source has 1903) as a guest house. […]
On 12th December 1933 the old West Riding region of the Youth Hostels Association opened a medium-sized hostel in the redundant former Church of England school in Kettlewell. […]
Whenever we change the menu, we think that it is important to have just as good an offering for vegetarians and vegans as we have for the meat eaters. Where we have the 8 hour beef stew, we have a hearty bean stew. Where we have the harissa spiced lamb stew, we have a harissa roasted vegetables stew and so on. […]
I have always loved bookshops, when Floss and I first met in Cambridge, we used to hang out in CB1 on Mill Road, which was an internet cafe in the days when this was a new thing. The cafe had secondhand books lining the walls, we would sit for ages, drinking filter coffee (with free refills) and occasionally pick up an old penguin to look at for a while, conversations flow easily with books around. […]
Whenever we change the menu, we think that it is important to have just as good an offering for vegetarians and vegans as we have for the meat eaters. Where we have the 8 hour beef stew, we have a hearty bean stew. Where we have the harissa spiced lamb stew, we have a harissa roasted vegetables stew and so on. […]
When we saw the pictures of the hostel in the estate agents’ details, we fell in love with the place, we had bought and lived in a few houses that ‘needed improvement’ over the years so we weren’t too daunted by the prospect of hard work but I don’t think that we had realised quite how much more work a 14-bedroom building with three kitchens would be than normal house in Harrogate! […]