Knoll House, Dorset: family-friendly hotels

By Simon Briggs Published: 11:13AM GMT 04 March 2010

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Previous of Images Next Magnificent views of the Isle of Purbeck seashore are piece of the captivate of Knoll House Photo: ALAMY Knoll House Hotel has been run by the same family for the past half-century

Arriving at Knoll House, it is easy to see because Enid Blyton was a unchanging visitor. The road house is set on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, among the sort of rolling hills, forests and beaches that will keep any immature adventurer amused. And nonetheless the writer who comes to mind when you initial arrive is not so majority Blyton as Agatha Christie.

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There is no run as such, some-more a front loll with comfy sofas, low tables and a Thirties flavour. The sort of room, in alternative words, that competence have hosted the issue stage from The Body In The Library. Our revisit came during tenure time, when white-haired ladies have up the hotel"s core clientele. We half-expected one of them to set down her teacup and lift out a telegraph from Interpol.

Family-friendly hotels: Bedruthan Steps, CornwallFamily-friendly hotels: Calcot Manor, Gloucestershire

Knoll House Hotel has been run by the same family for the past half-century, that helps to insist because the see and feel have frequency altered in that time. Indeed, majority of the guest have been entrance given the Fifties, when one of the rites of thoroughfare was an key to the hotel"s matriarch, the fearsome Mrs Ferguson. These visitors proposed out as well-heeled couples seeking to perform their young kids by the summer holiday. Now the young kids have grown, they move their dogs instead.

Labradors, dachshunds and wire-haired terriers lay obediently in the loll whilst their owners take tea. At least, majority of them do. We know one brash lurcher that transient from the owners, rampaged around the dining room and vaulted over the accepting desk. No one seemed to mind.

The hotel"s demographic changes during the propagandize holidays, when the four-footed friends are transposed by two-footed ones. Knoll House trades on the repute as a family retreat, charity an journey playground, a usual room, swimming and paddling pools, a pitch-and-putt march and a cackle of happy cooking ladies portion up sausage and chips at 5.30pm.

As at the Bedruthan Steps Hotel, the goal is to give relatives a possibility to relax, nonetheless the dual hotels go about it in really opposite ways. While Bedruthan Steps opts for the hi-tech resolution to baby-listening, Knoll House, in the undying way, offers a tame A-level tyro instead. Ours pored over Nabokov march records at a table set outward the room door.

The adults" dining room serves a intemperate seafood smorgasboard at lunchtime and a robust à la grant for dinner, surfaced off by a fantastic and corrupted form of puddings. We stayed for a week end and, notwithstanding the clarity of anachronism, Knoll House Hotel was a pleasant place to be. The environment is glorious. If you leave the road house by the front door, and strut opposite the pitch-and-putt course, you find yourself on the prolonged white-sand bend of Studland Bay, the beach pitted with rockpools at low tide. I ran around pciking up crabs, shrimps and sea anemones in a bucket to that my daughter Leela lifted one eyebrow and sighed, "Very good, Daddy."

Alternatively, you can travel internal towards the Agglestone, a outrageous stone that according to fable was thrown by the demon all the approach from the Isle of Wight. The track takes you by marshy woodland up to a heath with a pretentious perspective of the bay. Not even the oil-drilling height usually off the Goathorn Peninsula can spoil the panorama.

Knoll House"s bedrooms and bathrooms have had a new makeover and their clean, unfussy lines give them a some-more � la mode feel than any of the open areas. Ours had a digital air wave rather than a television, that valid to be something of a blessing. Instead of examination CBeebies, the young kids upheld the time by bopping to Michael Jackson.

My usually censure about the road house relates to the service, that was glorious in the dining bedrooms but not at the front desk. After a gruesome two-and-a-half-hour drive, the receptionist"s glacial demeanour was sufficient to prompt thoughts of Murder Most Foul.

Basics

Knoll House (01929 450450; knollhouse.co.uk) Rates for adults begin at �98 per chairman a night, half board. Rates for family groups change according to date of revisit and age of children, but a family of four, with young kids elderly 3 and seven, would compensate �1,091, full board, for a four-day mangle in Easter propagandize holidays (starting on Apr 12). Prices outward propagandize holidays are extremely lower.