There is among the English aristocracy a common species of buffoon that combines surface beauty with intellectual docility and gracelessness. You know the type I mean. Think of Zara Phillips, who on winning BBC Sports Personality of the Year five years back accepted her award with an utterly absurd speech, in which she seemed to abandon the rudiments of her expensive education and said the word "amazing" nine times in succession. It would have seemed a brilliant bit of oratory if the volume were switched to mute.
Ms Phillips would feel very at home in the garlanded Gidleigh Park, a hotel of immense beauty with brilliant food, massively let down only by its prices. Perched on a throne atop a wooded valley in Dartmoor, and set among 54 acres of gloriously kept gardens, it is a three-storey, long Tudor building, which gains charm from being at the end of a one-and-a-half mile driveway. It was built in the 1920s by an Australian shipping magnate, and has won so many awards that it is now one of Devon's more celebrated tourist destinations.
But I am here for lunch with my girlfriend Charlie and her family, and not long after arriving, we are made to feel very queasy. Our red Audi is the only non-4x4 in the parking lot, save for two Porsches and an Aston Martin, and on entering the restaurant, and being guided to a waiting-room, we notice that those cars probably belong to one of two groups of corporate weekenders. That, predictably and unfortunately, is the clientele here: herds of touring suits.
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/
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