Coulscott appears in the Mail on Sunday 09/05/10 - Never Mind the Wetsuits

Our gorgeous micro pigs arrived this week and are living with our three pygmy goats.  The ginger one is called Gladstone and the black and white one Disraeli.  We are spending a lot of time with them to make them tame and can see a huge change in just a few days.  They should grow to the size of a fat Cocker Spaniel and are apparently trainable.  Our aim is for them to respond to their names.  While we wait for our two acre fox proof enclosure to be finished all the animals are living in our garden.  The pigs in a very short time have created a vast hole, despite their small size.

We were delighted to appear in the Mail on Sunday this month.  They gave us a very good write up and clearly had a fun stay despite last summer’s rain.  The article gave us a huge volume of hits to our website and a large number of phone calls.

The swimming pool’s shower and changing room are now nearly complete and should be finished sometime this week.  They have been totally refurbished with new slate tiling and shower and look so much better.  This will be the last of our huge plan of refurbishment, which has taken us three years to do.

The weather has mostly been fine with a lot less rain than usual.  Guests are spending a lot of time on the beaches and those with wetsuits are taking advantage of the good surfing and body boarding there is on offer within a short drive of Coulscott.  The Icelandic ash cloud has given us some spectacular sunsets which have been best observed from the comfort of the hot tubs.  In the early days of the cloud it was interesting how the animals reacted; they could clearly smell something well before we could and were all disturbed.  We had a lot of dust falling on cars which was very obvious in the absence of any rain.  As usual any disruption to flights gives us a lot of enquiries for holidays.  It seems as people are voting with their feet to avoid airports for many, many reasons.

All the enormous number of spring bulbs that we planted to give guests flowers in their houses have been fantastic but unfortunately they are now coming to an end.  They have been well received and it is something that we would like to continue.  We have no time on changeover days for the hour round trip to the florist so must clearly grow our own.  We now have to wait until the autumn to plant the lilies and other summer flowering bulbs we need, so the nearly year round flowers we would like to try and provide will have to wait until next year.

We have introduced some goose down and feather pillows in all the houses so that guests have the choice of synthetic and natural pillows when they arrive.  We are pleased with the high quality of them and they are very comfortable.  Guests continue to like our beds and several times a year buy new mattresses when they get home from our supplier.