Wreck of the Week

My post about Lochanhead House sparked a lot of interest so I thought I'd tell you about another former hotel on the market. Because sometimes you want more than a cottage in a wood . Or a haven from the walking dead . Skinburness Hotel, around ten miles from Silloth in the Cumbrian coastal village of Skinburness, doesn't have any internal photos. Nor even a description of the inside of the building, number of rooms, bathrooms etc - the usual stuff you might expect. That, plus various notes on the agent's website make me wonder whether this is just a fairly expensive plot of land for sale. Which is a bit weird because the hotel is the middle of the village, as Streetview helpfully shows. It was a hotel up until 2006. And a pretty handsome one at that - the original building dates from 1878. There are some pictures and videos taken by urban explorers in 2011  on derelictplaces.co.uk  and in this 28DaysLater video, shot earlier this year : Back in 2010,...

I had a couple of emails after my post about the semi-derelict Lochanhead House ( here ) which warranted an update. My spider sense tells me there's a bigger, sadder story here. Helen wrote to say that she and her husband have tried to view the property several times in the five years it's been on the market: The owner of Lochanhead is an elderly lady who has given directions that only a cash buyer can view the house - we have tried to go and view several times...but excuses have been made as to why we couldn't, with the last being refused as we are not cash buyers. We were hoping to go and survey what work needed done but that hasn't been possible.  She notes that five years ago, when the property went onto the market, the building still had all its windows and roof so dereliction has been "quite quick". Jane made a similar comment in her email, pointing out that ion 2011 the listing on Rightmove showed a rather lovely interior; "I can't im...

I was trying to think of a bit of the UK I haven't been to for a while - metaphorically speaking. Then realised I had a whole bunch of properties on my 'to-do' list in somewhere called Gloucestershire. (Sorry, came over all Northern then). The four-bedroom cottage, above and below, is about half-a-mile outside the village of Lydbrook, on the edge of the Wye Valley. It comes with an acre-and-a-half of stepped land and woodland (some of it rather precarious-looking) and isn't exactly the prettiest building in the world. The streetview was a bit offputting too - looks like parking could be at the bottom of that hill: Having said all that, it's in a quiet, rural location in a pretty area. And (rebuilt) this could be a fabulous room with a view: On the market through Steve Gooch at £295k. Details here and here . Rather less remote is this cottage in the village of Hartpury. It's a terrace, and we all know I don't generally ...