Romance Wanderlust: The Forest Side

Since it’s October, I wanted to find you all a nice crumbly mansion set in a mysterious forest for our Romance Wanderlust column, and the Internet did not disappoint. The Forest Side is in Cumbria, England and was voted “The UK’s Most Romantic Hotel” by Good Hotel Guide 2018. It’s super Gothic on the outside, it’s pretty and airy on the inside, and it’s close to the long time home of poet William Wordsworth and a village that is famous for its gingerbread. So basically it’s like many romantic ideas in one place.

The building which houses the Forest Side Hotel was constructed around 1853. It’s surrounded by forest which Wordsworth described in in his poem “Michael.” The current owners renovated the building in 2014. They updated the infrastructure but restored the gardens and a waterfall and stone circle and “fernery”. They also planted a herb and vegetable garden which supplies the restaurant and which guests are encouraged to explore. The lounge still has the original fireplace and they recycled the wood from the old floors into tables and signs.

Since I did promise Gothic, here are some Gothic things about the hotel:

1. You can bring a dog. Extra points if it stares at nothing, growls, and then hides under the bed.
2. The onsite restaurant features a nicely fascinating menu with items like “Burnt Cabbage,” “Duck Heart Salad,” “Herdwick Hogget,” “Goosnargh Guinea Hen,” and something called “Sea Pig” which, as far as I could determine, is not made of sea pig. Extra points if your dining companion either claims not to drink…wine, or slugs it bitterly while snarking, “After all, we may as well enjoy the moment…we can’t escape our fates.”
3. The hotel advertises itself having having luxurious carpets and linens but it does not specify nightwear so you should bring your own diaphanous white nightgown for midnight rambles. Make them short rambles because you will get cold. It seems that mysterious fogs are all the rage there.

The bedrooms and bathrooms aren’t Gothic at all, which is frankly a relief because a truly Gothic bedroom seems miserable – drafty, cobwebby, and you’d never get an uninterrupted night of sleep what with whispers and window raps and people setting fire to your bed curtains. The bedrooms at Forest Side look very pretty and comfy. They have nice light colors and a lot of satin and velvet and also giant bathtubs.

Meanwhile the village of Grasmere has a lot of food and history and stuff but most notably it has this special kind of gingerbread, it has a place that sells nothing but handmade chocolate, and it has cheeses and “rum butter”. Also it has Dove Cottage, where poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived for eight years, and the Wordsworth Museum. You can visit his grave and a daffodil garden and zip over to Ullswater and wander lonely as a cloud beside the daffodils, preferably while munching on gingerbread.

I have not been to Grasmere or The Forest Side (which seems truly criminal, don’t you think?) so this is neither a review nor a recommendation. In the course of reading about this hotel, I managed to learn that Sarah Nelson invented her gingerbread recipe in 1854 and it’s locked in a bank vault, and that hogget means “a sheep of either sex having no more than two permanent incisors in wear”, and that William Wordsworth’s wife, Mary, came up with the lines “They flash upon the inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude.” I also learned about sea pigs (AKA guinea pigs) and sea pigs (a type of sea cucumber), and weather conditions on fells as well as the difference between a lake and a tarn. This, dear readers, is why I am not sufficiently productive to earn enough money to go to Grasmere, although if I do I know, I’ll know a lot of stuff.