Hilton Park

If you long to visit a spot off the beaten track and enjoy wonderful hospitality and divine food, you can do no better than to stay with Lucy and Johnny Madden on the Hilton Park estate. Lucy’s passion is growing vegetables for the kitchen, Johnny’s family home is so grand that it is hard to believe that it is a real home and not the kind where you pay a visitor’s entrance fee and their son is the talented chef. It’s a beautiful house of lovely rooms where guestrooms range from vast (the gorgeous Blue room and Parents room) with grand floor-to-ceiling beds, views of the lake and superb bathrooms with tubs and showers, to more modest in size, with regular-sized bathrooms containing old soaking tubs. Guests relax in the beautiful drawing room, enjoying pre-dinner drinks, conversation, and views across the terrace of formal gardens to the lake. The same enchanting view is enjoyed in the elegant dining room where guests dine at separate tables by the gentle flicker of candlelight. Breakfast is taken “below stairs” in the former servants’ hall. Have your own house party by renting the entire place! An added bonus is that guests play for free on the estates 18 hole golf course. Popular sightseeing includes Belleek with its pottery, Lough Erne, Castle Coole, and Florence Court.