There's something experimental about this post. You'll wonder why I'm talking about hotel and accommodation facilities in a village in the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, or in the Orkneys, and providing you with links to Longhope in the Orkneys and to The Farmer's Boy. And at the same time why I'm accompanying the post with images which show interesting features but are or questionable relevance to staying in Gloucestershire, or traveling to Orkney or other far highlands and islands in Scotland.

I post on many subjects - from open source to railways, from hotel operation to family, and about places I have been. But I'm certain that I've never been to Longhope in the Orkneys, nor indeed to Kirkwall or Hoy (though I would love to visit to give a course there!). I may have passed through the Longhope in Gloucestershire at some time - perhaps on my way to Hay on Wye or Monmouth - but is hasn't struck in my memory - I haven't stopped there overnight - not even for Bed and Breakfast.

So - why the post? An email tells me that our website only comes up on page 3 on a search using the words Longhope and hotel and offers to attempt to get us onto the top for people looking for accommodation in that town, for the payment of eighty pounds as a retainer, and further monies up to 300 pounds if they achieve success, and then a forty pound per month fee to keep us there. Of course, as far as I'm concerned I found the whole thing slightly entertaining - we lack en-suites in Longhope, Gloucstershire, we have no rooms in which you can stay in Longhope, Orkney, so the approach was so far of the mark to be laughable. But I do recall in the past that a delegate joked about "anything Melksham comes to Well House in a search" and I disabused him by pointing out we weren't listed under "Melksham Florist". So he used that term (as I'm using Hotel and Longhope) and some associated flowery words in a forum post,and up we sprung.

I don't know how much such mentions, off-topic, work today. So I've carefully described things here - looking at stopping near the Severn, traveling off Scotland by ferry, mentioning famous things like the Longhope Lifeboat and Blackhammer Cairn, and talking about bars and breakfast, bedrooms and sea views, to see how the land lies these days. In many ways, I hope this page hadn't sprung up for you if you've been looking for Longhope or to stay there - if it has, I can only apologies for my effective advertising - and suggest that you follow links such as [here] for Longhope in the Orkneys or [here] for Longhope in the Forest of Dean.


And yet ... having written about lovely villages of which I have no knowledge, I think and realise that I *have* heard of at least one of them previously - if you played a word association game with me you might say "Longhope" and I would have said "lifeboat". And, pressed, I could have pointed to the Shetlands or the Orkneys, and told of Vikings and open countryside to walk in, and sea. Of long summer evenings and a dark midwinter. A lovely place for a holiday one of these years, and if we could find en-suite accommodation that welcomes pets in Longhope, then why not?

And on our own pages, you'll find pictures of St Braivels Castle and a review of the future of railway preservation which are both Forest of Dean stories ... indeed, we *did* stay at the Lindors Hotel in the Wye Valley a couple of years back, after much calling around to find available guest houses in the Coleford area, with which we were out of luck on an August Bank Holiday.

I'll revisit my Hotel in Longhope page - this page - from time to time. Currently one of our sites comes in at about number 100 for the term used at the place I looked, and I'll see what happens - and update you here and elsewhere. The illustrations are of Somerset, by the way - Bath and Radstock. Our own hotel - Well House Manor - is in Wiltshire, a lovely county to stay in, but very different to the Welsh Marches or the Scottish Offshore Islands.

And having been reading about Longhope, it's now somewhere I would like to see given a chance. Funny what a random email about a hotel can do, isn't it?



Update - 48 hours after initial publication of this blog article about the Longhope Hotel, and we have reached the first page - "above the fold" too.
(written 2010-11-16, updated 2010-12-04)

 M401 - Well House Manor - Seeing how others do it
  [17] Differing tastes - (2004-08-17)
  [514] Crazy Day-sies - (2005-12-02)
  [619] If its Sunday, it must be the Norland - (2006-02-23)
  [693] The on line booking experience - (2006-04-21)
  [699] Extremes costs of getting on line - (2006-04-25)
  [714] Room for Octopuses - (2006-05-08)
  [736] New Tape Librarian - (2006-05-28)
  [966] CSL, KISS and RTFM - (2006-12-05)
  [1011] Well House Manor and Beechfield House, Hotels, Melksham - (2006-12-29)
  [1026] The Wheatsheaf 2, The Bell 0 - (2007-01-09)
  [1091] The Psyche is all wrong. - (2007-02-24)
  [1205] Arrival and Departure experiences - another hotel - (2007-05-26)
  [1287] Work and play at Well House Manor - Football and Shell Shortcuts - (2007-08-02)
  [1301] Plastic or China - (2007-08-12)
  [1333] Kasteel Elsloo - Michelin rated hotel. - (2007-09-05)
  [1347] Wireless Internet Access at hotels - an update and some pitfalls - (2007-09-12)
  [1354] Match the Bedroom to the Hotel - (2007-09-17)
  [1356] Crystal Ball - How long do I need to be online? - (2007-09-18)
  [1374] Maidenhead Coffee Challenge - (2007-10-02)
  [1406] Away or home - which do I prefer? - (2007-10-25)
  [1413] The little gestures that can really count - (2007-10-27)
  [1454] From Sunday to Monday, from Melksham to the Balkans - (2007-12-03)
  [1458] The wrong way to put up prices - (2007-12-05)
  [1525] Just one thing let the service down - but that is my memory - (2008-01-31)
  [1547] New bathing idea for hotels from Hotelympia - (2008-02-20)
  [1597] Comparing hotels - as a guest and from the proprietors view - (2008-04-01)
  [1672] The Composting Cone Challenge - (2008-06-10)
  [1758] Lindors Hotel, near St. Briavels, Wye Valley - (2008-08-18)
  [1915] Quietly putting prices up - (2008-12-02)
  [2007] Launch of Melksham Food and Drink Festival - (2009-01-24)
  [2105] Hire Car, from Atlanta Airport - (2009-03-27)
  [2127] Call in the professionals! - (2009-04-12)
  [2308] A new place in pictures - (2009-07-28)
  [2311] Floor to ceiling - (2009-07-30)
  [2413] Sanity checking the price, and selling up to increase income - (2009-09-21)
  [2441] Not your cup of tea? - (2009-10-08)
  [2502] Monday night, Tuesday night - (2009-11-13)
  [2885] Twenty Questions - (2010-07-24)
  [2911] Feeding the Grockles - (2010-08-09)
  [3333] Honesty and a friendly welcome goes a long way - (2011-06-25)
  [3368] Well House Manor hotel, Melksham - recommended to you by our customers - (2011-07-23)
  [3754] Eyes Wide Open - (2012-06-06)
  [3776] Some traps it's so easy to fall into in designing your web site - (2012-06-23)
  [3794] Should hotel staff sit on the toilet in the customer bedrooms? - (2012-07-02)
  [3900] The Xxxxx Guest House in Xxxxxxxxxxx - my stay reviewed - (2012-10-20)
  [3963] National TV - Melksham - 9th January 2013, Pre-alert. - (2012-12-27)
  [3970] Comparing four VERY different places to stay - (2013-01-11)
  [3975] Being an amateur hotel inspector helps me run a professional hotel - (2013-01-14)
  [4058] The highs and lows of customer service - Cheltenham - (2013-04-03)
  [4081] Pushing down the advertised price, pushing up the total price charged. - (2013-05-08)
  [4091] A reminder of why we opened Well House Manor for our customers - (2013-05-17)
  [4093] More things to make sure that we do NOT do ... - (2013-05-18)
  [4109] What might you find at a tiny bed and breakfast? - (2013-06-03)
  [4177] Setting and publishing your hours to suit your customer base - (2013-09-18)
  [4245] It always happens to me when I'm in Borehamwood! - (2014-03-06)
  [4255] Making a personal gain from a more expensive business hotel stay - (2014-04-02)
  [4321] Are administration / review charges on hotel guests acceptable? - (2014-11-20)
  [4348] Taking my life in my hands in Swansea - (2014-12-11)
  [4373] A long and disappointing evening - (2014-12-30)
  [4443] Seventh stay away this year - and it's still only February! - (2015-02-25)

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Forward to Zyliana Kyrei Cox

MacBook Air - hardware and system review
Lots of things to do with and within a C++ class
C++ - a complete example with polymorphism, and how to split it into project files
Zyliana Kyrei Cox
Longhope Hotel
Make - automating the commands for building and installing
Getting your C++ program to run
Positively reforming the system - could it be done?
Views of Melksham - November 2010
Computer Graphics is fun - even if Java Applets are Old Hat