Ribble wibble

My wife and I are on an informal mission - to experience as many Michelin star restaurants as we can afford.

You can count the number we’ve been to on one hand but we’re working on it.

Oddly enough it’s not the food I tend to remember but the locations. So far we’ve been to Michelin restaurants in Lincolnshire, Fife, Cambridge and Bath and they have varied enormously and been memorable for different reasons.

I don’t have a favourite but I did enjoy the theatre of Midsummer House in Cambridge which had an open kitchen so diners could watch the food being prepared.

Menu Gordon Jones in Bath also had an open kitchen but what I most enjoyed was the size of the restaurant (very small) and the friendly informality. (The tiny premises were previously used by a florist, I believe.)

Rural Michelin restaurants are more likely, I imagine, to offer overnight accommodation which makes sense given that you will probably have driven there and will want to drink.

On Thursday we went to Northcote Hotel which is in the Ribble Valley in Lancashire. The original manor house dates back to 1884 but it’s been extended extensively since it became a hotel in the Eighties.

The restaurant was awarded a Michelin star in 1996 and has kept it ever since.

This post however is not about the hotel or the restaurant, excellent though they are, but the Ribble Valley.

I pride myself on having visited most parts of the UK including Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, but the Ribble Valley, an area that includes the Forest of Bowland and covers parts of Lancashire and North Yorkshire, has somehow passed me by and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Rurally it’s one of the most beautiful areas I’ve seen, reminiscent of the Derbyshire and Yorkshire Dales but arguably more remote and unheralded despite boasting, in Dunsop Bridge, the ‘exact centre’ of the United Kingdom.

Following the directions suggested by Northcote Hotel we visited the ‘picturesque’ village of Whalley and the ‘bustling market town’ of Clitheroe but it was the drive through villages like Slaidburn and Whitewell, up Pendle Hill and into the Hodder Valley with its ‘wide and spectacular views’ of the Bowland Fells that really surprised me.

As the hotel website says, ‘This is a different aspect of Lancashire and one that is almost unknown outside the county.’

I would go further and suggest that, ignoring the car we were in, it was possible to imagine we were back in the pre-industrial world of the early 19th century.

I was tempted to keep this information to myself but given the number of people who read this blog I don’t suppose tourists will be flooding the area any time soon.

Nevertheless you read it here first.

Above and below: Northcote Hotel from the balcony of our room