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Yoah Cottage Bed & Breakfast

Thatched, the cottage is built of stone and cob with exposed beams and inglenook fireplaces. The old rubs shoulders with the new - a mixture of antique furniture and modern comfort.

We only take one booking at a time so that guests have the whole of the early 18th century cottage (originally the shepherd's) to themselves, - the two bedrooms, the bathroom, a small ante-room for tea and coffee making and a cosy sitting room with log fire. We are usually able to provide supper by the fire if arranged in advance.

Rose lived in Sweden for some years and specializes in Swedish food. There is also a friendly village pub next door. Breakfasts are generous and varied with home-made jams and marmalades and fruit from the garden. The cottage is closed during the Christmas and Easter periods.

To stay at Yoah Cottage is to experience something a bit different. Originally two cottages, occupied in the 1930s by a carter and a shepherd (there is the date 1622 carved into the beam over the fireplace in what was the carter's cottage), it was made into one house about 65 years ago. Since then only two families have lived in it. You would not willingly choose to leave unless you had to!

One of the things which makes staying at Yoah Cottage different is the environment: the combination of old rugs, old china and glass, objets trouvés, books galore, with modern abstract and more naturalistic paintings by major 20th century artists collected over a lifetime. One American guest described it as his 'favourite art gallery'! Also we are both ceramic sculptors so there are examples of our own work throughout the house: Noah's Arks, Green Men, sheep, goats, geese, buzzards, hens, guinea fowl, hares, pigs etc. Every other May we turn our downstairs into an exhibition space and open to the public as part of the 'Dorset Art Weeks' event.

Many of our guests, including an ex-Archbishop and a fire-eater, have returned to stay at Yoah Cottage time after time. one family came to stay every year for many years having written in our visitor's book after their first visit, 'Bliss'. Others have described it as 'idyllic', 'memorable', 'most beautiful', 'extremely welcoming' and so on. But don't take their word for it, - come and stay and try it for yourselves!

French windows lead out from the guests' sitting room into the garden - a romantic 'oasis' with summer-house, a flagged path wandering among cottage flowers and shrubs, hedges separating one secret area from another, the whole surrounded by fields and mature birch and beech trees.