Forest Side Hotel

Forest Side Hotel

Forest Side sits above Grasmere in a Lake District Gothic mansion built in 1853 for a Salford solicitor named Stephen Heelis, whose family lies buried a short walk away in St Oswald's churchyard alongside William Wordsworth, who once walked these same hillsides with his sister Dorothy and used the setting for his poem Michael. The building fell quiet for decades before being taken back to its bare bones and rebuilt from 2014, uncovering a red-brick walled garden with a hidden waterfall and an ornamental stone circle along the way. What remains is a house with only three rooms, Standard, Superior and Deluxe, each with a private bathroom, TV, hairdryer and coffee facilities, so nobody blends into a corridor here. Head Chef Paul Leonard cooks from what the kitchen and local producers grow, with menus that shift by season rather than by trend, and the restaurant closes for evening meals on Mondays and Tuesdays, worth knowing before you plan a late arrival past 21:00. Guests can work through a sauna, hamam, solarium and spa treatments, or head outside toward Dove Cottage, Grasmere Gingerbread and Rydal Mount without a car. Free Wi-Fi, parking and English-speaking staff cover the practical side; concierge, laundry and private check-in cover the rest. This suits travellers who want a small, considered stay built around a kitchen and a garden rather than a lobby, not those chasing a resort's worth of facilities under one roof. Few Lake District hotels can point to a poem, a churchyard and a working walled garden as part of the same three-room address. A three-room Victorian mansion above Grasmere, rebuilt from a derelict shell into a restaurant-led stay with a walled garden and a churchyard connection to Wordsworth. The kitchen closes for dinner on Mondays and Tuesdays, so plan around it. Small, deliberate, not built for volume.