I had spied the hotel on the internet and the photo reminded me of this quaint little cottage. It is in a great location near to the centre of Chepstow, yet in a quiet little street on a one way system. The first shock was that there was no parking at all, the nearest car park is a public car park across the road..which is always completely full as Chepstow seems to have a problem with parking. The charge for this is 80p per hour but free overnight. We had no idea there was no parking before we got there.

The hotel is run by a lady on her own, and we rang her and she advised us to park by the castle which was only half a mile away. The problem we had with that was that our car was very full of very expensive diving equipment. We asked if we could at least bring the gear into the hotel rather than leave it in the car..she was very accomodating but said for us to meet her outside and she would give us a key as she was going out for the afternoon! She couldnt remember what we had booked and then gave us Room 3. That was the last we saw of her until breakfast the following morning. I filled the form in myself to check in and left it in reception. There were no other staff around.

The hotel was relatively clean but I was quite shocked when I got to our room..a small double that was decorated something like th 1950's..the furniture looked as if it had been claimed from a skip and then restored by hand..in fact you could see the varnish splatters on the mirror. Some of it was broken. The room was stuffy and smelt of mothballs. I opened the window which was a sliding window and it immediately crashed back down as the string was broken. We had no pillows for the bed and instead of a duvet, it was layers and layers of blankets like in the 70's when I was a kid. I found 1 pillow in a wardrobe. The bathroom was very small..enough room for a sink, a loo and the shower cubicle. It was the width of the shower cubicle..but the positive point was the heated towel rack.

There was only 1 double plug socket point which meant if you wanted to make yourself a drink you could not have the telly on! There was no remote for the telly and half the free view channels did not work becuase the reception was so poor..or it was not quite properly set up.

It is a very old cottage, in fact 2 knocked into 1 and looks very nice from the outside..the floors are uneven and the walls are so thin that when the people in the room switched their light on we heard the click of the switch! Talk about a passion killer!!

we got ourselves up for breakfast early and went downstairs at about 7.50am..she told us we were early as breakfast did not start until 8 but we could have a drink of coffee if we wanted. This is the first hotel i have ever been in where juice of any sort was not available. The coffee smelt good though. The proprietor asked us if we wanted full English/Welsh breakfast..advertised as sausage, bacon, egg, beans, tomato, hash brown and toast. Of course we did..but while we were waiting, the lights kept going on and off. She then came through and placed in front of us the most awful looking breakfast i have ever seen, minus the beans and said her cooker had been broken since Thursday and she had only the use of a deep fat fryer and a griddle..and that every time she switched the toaster on, it fused the power in the rest of the hotel! The tomato was burnt, but solid. My egg was burnt, rubbery and solid..it resembled a frisbee.

The worst thing for me was when I was tidying the room and making the bed rather than just leaving it..I thought i would start from scratch and pulled back everything completely and discovered that there was blood stains on the inside of the top blanket that most definitely did not belong to me or Rob. If I had seen them the night before there is no way I would have even attempted to sleep in a very uncomfortable bed.

This lady probably does a very good job of running the place largely on her own, a number of teenage girls did appear on Sunday morning to clean up and help with breakfasts etc..but in the main she does it all herself. I am sure this is an enormous task as there are 12 rooms and it is quite a big place but I think there are a number of improvements that need to be made. There were other divers staying there who we spoke to and they all said that it would be thier 2nd choice for accomodation. In my opinion, it fell at the first hurdle.