Tired of the Cotswolds Crowds? Dorset Is Calling

The author Bill Bryson was right. One morning in Dorset, I opened the curtains at my hotel and took in the verdant landscape leading down to the coast. “For miles around, the Dorset hills rolled and billowed like a shaken-out quilt settling onto a bed…in the distance, the sea, bright and vast and silvery blue, it was beautiful beyond words.” Bryson wrote those words some 30 years ago in his beloved travelogue, Notes From a Small Island. They still felt true, even in chilly December.

I was peering out of my window in the Louma Country Hotel, a new property on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast with 17 rooms dotted around a main farmhouse, cozy stone barns, converted stable blocks and timber cabins. Driving to Louma from my London flat took three and a half hours, about twice as long as it takes to get to my usual haunts in the Cotswolds.