Welcome to our blog about daily life at The Pheasant Inn.

News round up from The Pheasant Inn Kielder

In our latest blog we thought we would give you a round-up of what’s happening here at The Pheasant Inn Kielder, as we look forward into 2015.

It’s been all go as our winter refurbishment carries on at a pace, ahead of our re-opening next week. Robin has said a sad farewell to our trusty oven range, a Falcon Dominator which was installed in 1973 – the same year that Sunderland won the FA cup, if any of you can remember that far back. I can’t estimate how many tasty meals it’s produced but it must be in the tens of thousands, and we hope its replacement will be equally reliable.

Our dining room is also getting a makeover, with decorator Paul doing a great job finishing the painting ahead of the new soft furnishings arriving. We had a little bit of trouble with our beautiful new carpet recently, when a visitor accidentally walked some sort of heavy industrial grease right through the bar, dining room and up the stairs. Luckily, Barrasford-based carpet cleaning expert Malcolm Nixon was on our doorstep at 9.30am the following morning and did an amazing job cleaning the carpets – you wouldn’t even know there had been a problem, many thanks to him for helping us out.

It’s been a very chilly few weeks up here in Northumberland, and out in the kitchen garden, three loads of Ridley Stokoe farm’s finest manure and the local worms are busy working their magic, ready for the new growing season.

We’re also recruiting again, particularly for someone with kitchen experience and a keen interest in cooking, who can work alongside Robin or independently. If you know of anyone looking for a move, we would love to hear from them.

And lastly, the B&B season bookings are already taking off, in fact all our current accommodation is now booked for New Year break in 2015. We are hoping Garden Cottage, our new two bedroom self-catering cottage will be available by then too, pop over to our Facebook page to see how the conversion is coming along, and let us know what you think. 

Putting the garden to bed

As frost and the odd dusting of snow remind us that winter is well and truly here, the warm days of summer seem light years away but our thoughts are already turning to the kitchen garden. 2014 was a great summer for growing, and our gardening team Nathalie and Geoff did a wonderful job supplying us with many of the vegetables, salad, fruit and herbs that feature on our menus.

We like to use fresh, local produce wherever we can and having some space to grow our own fruit and vegetables means we have been able to reduce many of our food miles to something more like food feet. But we all need a rest after a busy season, and plants are no exception. Putting the garden to bed properly means better crops next year, so it’s well worth investing the effort.

As well as having pruned the fruit bushes and trees, tidied the raised beds that hold the salad and vegetables, and sorted out the greenhouse, Geoff and Natalie have been busy helping us to assess what we should grow next year, for instance we are looking at establishing an asparagus bed.

Our raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants and blackberries did really well thanks to the warm weather, featuring in many of our tasty fruit crumbles and in Annabel’s special home-made mixed berry jam which our guests can enjoy at breakfast so they will definitely feature in next year's plans.

Artichokes were a fairly new addition and went down well, particularly in a tasty artichoke and spinach soup, and we saw a bumper crop of fresh and crunchy salad ingredients. We had tomatoes coming out of our ears and I swear some of our giant onions and big healthy leeks could have won prizes at the local agricultural shows – maybe next year if one of us has the time?

As the garden yield slows down to mainly root vegetables, we will use what we have in crop and supplement that with produce from our regular supplier Staffords of Hexham, who will provide the rest of what we need.

If you’re a gardener, do enjoy planning out next year’s cropping plans over the Christmas break. And if you’ve got any tips for especially good varieties, do drop us a line and we might give them a try.

Stay at The Pheasant and see Northumberland Dark Sky Park

Did you know that an estimated 85% of people in the UK have never experienced the breathtaking beauty of a truly dark sky?

Here at the Pheasant Inn on the edge of Kielder Water and Forest Park, our skies have been awarded Gold Tier Dark Sky Park status by the International Dark Skies Association. That makes us the biggest Dark Sky Park area of protected night sky in Europe, and if you step out of the Pheasant Inn and look upwards you are looking at what is now officially named Northumberland Dark Sky Park.

We feel so lucky to live in such a beautiful part of the country. On an average night we might see between 1,500 and 2,000 stars, and on a clear night we can sometimes even see the Milky Way.

The Hexham Courant, the Journal and other regional newspapers and magazines have been full of the news that Kielder Observatory has launched a bid to launch an £8.5m Astronomy Village project that will include a 60 seat planetarium, glass topped pods, a telescope with a one metre wide aperture accessible to wheelchair users, and an accommodation block for visiting astronomers.

The observatory draws around 25,000 visitors a year, from professional and amateur astronomers to couples and families with children, and some of them travel thousands of miles to admire our beautiful Northumberland skies.

We are only a 10-minute drive away from the observatory and lots of visitors choose to stay overnight in our comfortably-furnished Northumberland B&B accommodation. We’re glad to go the extra mile for our stargazing visitors, for instance providing early dining for those leaving for the observatory between 5.30 and 6 pm.

Northumberland Dark Sky Park is now officially one of the best places to stargaze in the whole of Europe. And after an evening spent wondering at the majesty of the galaxy, many of our visitors tell us there are few things nicer than sinking into one of our comfy beds and dreaming of the hearty Northumberland breakfast that awaits them in the morning.