Manor Cottages, England

We rented Footstool Cottage from Manor Cottages for two weeks in June 2009. The price was good – 557 GBP per week in high season (about 0). Footstool is a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom historic cottage on a quiet lane in Fulbrook, a small village on the main A361 road north of Burford in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds (England). The main road is busy & splits the village, but you do not hear road noise from the cottage.

Fulbrook has no shops, two pubs & a Norman church. There are a couple of footpaths you can take for countryside walks. You can walk into Burford – 1/2 mile away (you have to walk along the main road but there is a sidewalk – the agency description says “public footpath to Burford” which I assumed was through the countryside, but they must mean the sidewalk). Burford has all the shops & restaurants you need & is a charming market town.

Footstool is a nice enough cottage but has a few issues. First the good things. The location is good. The cottage has one of the best outdoor spaces we have ever had – a terrace leading to a small lawn surrounded by trees & flower gardens (no views). The garden has high walls & is private. Nice outdoor furniture. We used the outdoor space a lot on those long June nights. For colder weather there is a fireplace & they leave you plenty of wood.

Now the problems. The kitchen (which looks like a gourmet kitchen in the photos) is “tired”. I could not get the gas stove to go below a medium flame (to simmer I had to use 2 heat diffusers on a burner). The fridge makes a loud noise when running. Not much counter space. I think my main issue is that the Internetsite photo makes it looks like a gourmet kitchen, but it is not.

The heating system is night storage heaters which are not easy to use (no mention of this in the agency description) & only work well when the weather is consistent (you have to know the night before how to set them for the next day). The information about the heating system in the house book did not explain how it works. When we arrived the heaters were turned off because it had been hot the week before. We had a few cold nights at the start of our stay. We called the house keeper & left a message which was never returned (we should have called the owner but I had assumed the house keeper would call back). We finally figured out how to use the heaters after calling the agency (they called the owner).

The furniture in the cottage is plain & a jumble of styles, but is comfortable. The ceilings are shockingly low in some rooms (but this is to be expected in an older cottage).

We rented this cottage because of the location, which was good, & because the cottage had internet access, which worked well. I would not rent the cottage again because we cook most of our meals at home & the kitchen was not good to work in.