Breakfast here is not a buffet and never will be. It starts with oats soaked overnight, bread from the bakery in Marlow, eggs from the Hendricks farm, and coffee poured at the table rather than fetched from a machine. If you are heading out early, we wrap a walker's breakfast the night before and leave it on the hall table with your name on it.
The dining room in the morning is half the point of the house.
Guests often ask why we do not serve breakfast in rooms. The honest answer is that the dining room in the morning is half the point of the house: sun on the sideboard, maps spread between cups, strangers trading trail notes. Room trays always arrive cold. Morning conversation never does.
May 30, 2026 · The hills
Walking the Calloway Way: three loops from our gate
You do not need to drive anywhere to walk here. The short loop (4 miles) crosses the meadow and returns along the beech wood; it is the one to do before dinner. The middle loop (7 miles) climbs to the dry stone ridge where, on a clear day, you can count five valleys. The long loop (11 miles) drops to the river and the old mill, and we will pack you lunch if you ask the night before.
Boots, coats, maps, and drying racks are in the boot room. That is the whole hiking kit list.
Boots, coats, maps, and drying racks are in the boot room by the back door. If the weather turns on you mid-walk, call the house and someone will come and collect you from the ridge road. It happens more often than anyone admits at check-in.
May 9, 2026 · The garden
The garden in June
June is the garden's loud month. The lupines in the lower meadow peak in the second week, the walled garden starts giving the kitchen more herbs than it can use, and tea migrates outside for good. Mrs. Abernathy, who has gardened here for twenty-two years, calls it 'the month the house holds its breath.'
If you visit in June, ask her what is cutting that week. Guests have gone home with sweet peas, rosemary, and once, memorably, a rhubarb crown wrapped in newspaper.
The dining room seats fourteen at one table, and fourteen is the right number. More becomes a banquet; fewer loses the hum. For birthdays, anniversaries, and small weddings we set the long table with candles down the middle, a set menu written around the season, and the fire lit if there is any excuse for it.
Fourteen is the right number. More becomes a banquet; fewer loses the hum.
We host twelve private gatherings a year and no more, because the house belongs to overnight guests first. Dates for autumn open in June, and they tend to go quietly and quickly.
The oldest stones here were laid in 1897 for a wool merchant who wanted, in his own words, 'a house the weather cannot insult.' It was a shooting lodge for a while, a convalescent home during the war, and a school for eleven strange months in the 1960s. It has been an inn since 1981.
We keep a box of things found in the walls during repairs: a child's marble, a tobacconist's token, three love letters (returned to the family), and a menu from 1904 that is suspiciously similar to this spring's. Houses like this are not owned so much as borrowed. We try to be good borrowers.