Time for an update! 

We hope you are all well and managing to cope with lockdown.  We just wanted to let you know where we are with re-opening in regard to Covid-19 and what we have been doing to amuse ourselves while we are closed.

We are waiting for the Government to announce a date when we will be allowed to reopen.  The only thing we are sure of right now is that the beginning of July is the earliest this might be allowed.  A lot depends on what happens in the next few weeks in terms of infection rates.

As soon as we have a date we will be emailing you again and announcing it on our Facebook and Instagram pages. 

In the meantime we are researching what protection we need to put in place to make sure your next stay with us is as safe as we can make it.  We are expecting guidance to be published over the coming weeks to help with this.

Skiddaw Croft has seemed very quiet since lockdown however we have tried to keep busy by catching up with all the little jobs that we don’t normally have time for.  Steve has repainted the garage, which was long overdue, and we have done other maintenance jobs.  I have been baking to pass the time, when I can get hold of ingredients.  The only problem with this has been we have been eating and, along with a lot of the population, putting on those dreaded lockdown pounds!  I had a ‘lockdown birthday’ at the beginning of May so of course a birthday cake was needed J.  In an attempt to balance this we have been out walking most days and below are some photos from our walks over the last few weeks. 

We have been lucky enough to have some amazing weather, which has meant everything has looked particularly good.  We have kept to low level walks, following the advice of the local mountain rescue teams, trying to average 5 miles a day.

One of the positive effects of lockdown has been on the local wildlife.  The birdsong seems much louder and the animals are much more confident to be out and about.  We had a sparrowhawk sat on our top step in the garden for 20 minutes recently, which was amazing. On one of our walks last week we saw deer in the woods and a couple of hares playing in a field.  Bird wise on our walks we have seen the usual suspects and also nuthatches, sandpipers, tree creepers, geese with goslings, ducks with ducklings, moorhens, wagtails, warblers and we even saw the cuckoo we had had been hearing for weeks. 

Finally, thank you to all of you who have called, emailed and written to us to offer your thoughts and support.  They have meant so much to us and helped us through those tough moments during the last 10 weeks.

We hope you enjoy looking at our photos and we will be in touch again when we have more definitive information about opening up and being able to welcome you all back again.  We are looking forward to seeing you soon.

Sue & Steve