The country’s gone to the DOGS!
More and more hotels are welcoming four-legged guests... and that’s just as it should be, says JANE FRYER, who takes Pip to Yorkshire
THE last time we went on holiday, our little dog, Pip, was left behind. Not alone — she was at home happily snuggled up on the sofa with au-pair Nikola.
But we missed her, terribly. Our sons, aged six and eight, usually the best of friends, bickered and fought. We all felt off-key and over the long, hot fortnight, pestered poor Nikola — first for photos of eight-month-old Pip (a Jack Russell /Plummer terrier cross), then videos of her chewing tennis balls and chasing pigeons. One day, after too many glasses of holiday rose, we actually tried to FaceTime her (I know, I know…) and felt very silly.
So when I heard about PetsPyjamas — a travel concierge service for people who want to holiday with their pets — instead of thinking, ‘what a ridiculous idea, it’s just a bloody dog’, I called them immediately and discovered they could fix up pretty much anything.
Fancy a coastal cottage where your pooch can gallop across golden sands? They can sort it. City break? No problem. The Lanesborough hotel in London’s Knightsbridge even has a butler to walk your dog while you shop.
How about really pushing the boat out at £445-a-night Cliveden House, in Berkshire — backdrop to the Sixties Profumo scandal? Absolutely! Cliveden even has a canine concierge, a dog that personally welcomes visiting hounds. Pets can also select gourmet meals from the chef’s canine menu. No wonder model
David Gandy and his rescue dog, Dora, are such PetsPyjamas fans.
For us, they suggested the Feversham Arms Hotel in Helmsley, North Yorkshire — a stylish mix of old stone, modern glass, walls festooned with works from local artists and, frankly, with its outdoor heated pool and award-winning spa, not really the sort of place you’d expect to bring your dog.
But they clearly love animals because every time we appear, the beaming staff greet Pip by name. Her welcome pack in our poolside family suite outshone ours — two bowls, a rug with a natty bone design, a selection of tasty treats and a furry mallard duck toy.
Even better, because PetsPyjamas’ 12 canine reviewers (yes, really) have personally reviewed every hotel, B&B or cottage, and there is screeds of information about what to do in the area.
So we know Helmsley ( pronounced ’Elmsley), a pretty market town in Ryedale on the edge of the Vale of Pickering, is dog heaven.
It has its own (dog-friendly) medieval stone castle to visit, complete with beautiful gardens, a fantastic butcher who dispenses bones, an award-winning deli, about a thousand tea shops, a slew of antiques shops (none dog-friendly) and the wonderfully higgledy- piggledy Black Swan — the Feversham’s sister hotel, right on the market square, which also welcomes dogs.
The ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, a Cistercian monastery founded in 1132 and seized by Henry VIII in 1538 during his dissolution of the monasteries, can be reached by a seven-mile circular walk.
Rising from a wooded vale, the scale is astonishing — sweeping arches and great halls the size of football pitches — and the audio guide, in the surprisingly perky voice of a supposedly longdead Cistercian monk, is the only one ever to have held my boys’ interest: ‘Wow! D’you think he’s a zombie monk?’
We spend a couple of hours pottering about and rolling down grassy banks until, fuelled by an unusual pairing of Coca-Cola and fistfuls of the peppery wild garlic that grows in lush green carpets in the woods, we head back so the boys can jump into the Feversham’s
steaming outdoor pool and i can slide off to the sleek spa.
in some hotels, the Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds for one, PetsPyjamas will arrange a spa treatment for your dog alongside you. i love Pip (pictured right), but had to draw the line somewhere.
she had breakfast with us — dogs at the Feversham get their own place setting in the tartan bar with a starched white napkin, plus bone- shaped biscuits. At dinner, we left her conked out on our suite’s under-heated floor and opted for the light-filled, dog-free restaurant where the food was sublime and the boys weirdly well-behaved. For our next outing, we boarded the lovingly buffed and polished north Yorkshire Moors railway steam train at Pickering. what a delight, eating 99 ice creams as we puff deep into the moors, through bracken and pink gorse, with birds of prey circling ahead and Pip barking like am ad thing at adders. holidaying with your dog is a surprising joy. not least, because it’s a bit like having a baby all over again (but without the plastic paraphernalia) and you somehow end up chatting to, well, everyone.
it was at the end of another perfect day, over pints of cider and vast cheese and corned beef baps (Pip, too) in the garden of the brilliant Birch hall inn in Beck hole, that we meet the nicholls family from the wirral. They have left their Doberman, Clive, at home with a dog sitter.
‘it’s the first holiday in eight years we’ve had without him,’ say dad keith, a tattooed electrician whose eyes brim as he whips out his phone to share lots of photos of Clive.
Gosh, and how’s it going? ‘we’re missing him so badly we’re going home early!’ the whole family chorus. ‘we can’t wait to see his silly face again.’
of course they can’t. if only they’d heard of PetsPyjamas then Clive would be here too, happily wolfing corned beef baps with Pip.