The Manor House, Castle Combe And The Lotus Emira: A Very British Escape With A Mid-Engined Twist

A large SUV appears entirely at home pulling up to a grand historic building, as though it has merely returned from a light bout of pheasant disturbance. A discreet German saloon also looks suitable, particularly if it is muted in colour, electric-silent and wafting across the pea shingle.

But a bright purple Lotus? This is not discreet. It does not sidle quietly into an open forecourt and hope not to be noticed. It arrives with the visual and audible subtlety of a quality-street wrapper at a funeral.

And yet, as I give the accelerator a quarter-inch prod before turning the engine off, it felt perfect. The Manor House gives you history, comfort and stillness. The Emira gives you sharpness, movement and noise. The village invites you to slow down. The car reminds you that roads are there to be driven. The hotel is about settling in and the Lotus is about setting off. Contrast defined.

The Manor House, all honeyed stone, ancient-roofed and mullion-windowed clearly agreed because draped across the front of the hotel in soft lilac blooms was a wisteria, which gave the whole scene an absurdly convenient sense of colour coordination. The Emira had not turned up to clash with the location. It had turned up dressed for it.

Castle Combe is one of those villages that looks as though it has been built by someone with a suspiciously advanced understanding of modern tourism Instagram trends. Except it hasn’t. It is real and is it staggeringly beautiful. The stone cottages gather in huddles, the rooftops twist and settle into each other and the whole place seems to have been preserved in a state of permanent good manners. It is not so much picturesque as almost offensively picturesque.

The drive in is part of the charm. In a modern performance car, especially one as low and alert as the Lotus, arriving in Castle Combe is not a matter of simply blasting your way through. You become aware of everything that might get you, the decreasing width of the road, the jagged dry stone walls, the verges and the places where passing another vehicle becomes an act involving crossed fingers.

This is not a place that encourages haste. It encourages precision. Fortunately, precision is one of the things Lotus has always understood rather well.

The Emira V6 SE feels alive at low speed in a way many modern sports cars can’t. There is a sense of mechanical connection. Around the surrounding Wiltshire lanes, it had just enough theatre to feel special without becoming tiresome. It is compact enough to suit the place, dramatic enough to turn heads and civilised enough not to make you question your life choices every time the road opens up.

Still, the car is not the main character here. Not quite. This particular piece is all about the place.

The Manor House does what the best country house hotels do: it makes arrival feel like an event. You turn off from the village and into the grounds and suddenly the outside world starts to soften at the edges. The building reveals itself dramatically from the approach and the entrance suggests you have arrived somewhere with a memory a lot longer than yours.

Inside, The Manor House smells exactly as it should. That may sound like an odd compliment, but it is not. Great old hotels have a scent of polished wood, old stone, open fires, upholstery and with any luck, somewhere in the background, expensive wine. The interior carries that proper old-country-house character of panelling, wainscot, corridors and those little undulations in floor levels every old building has.

The Manor House gives you good texture. It gives you shadows. It gives you the sense that the building has accumulated itself over time and has no intention of explaining the layout to you in a hurry.

My room was Home Meadow and reaching it was less a walk from reception and more a small expedition through the building’s historic subconscious. The route took in corridors, turns, staircases that I instantly forgot, all stitched together in that wonderfully illogical way.

This is, in my view, a good thing. A country house hotel should have a little mystery. You should not be able to understand it in the first ten minutes. There should be nooks and crannies. There should be rooms you discover by accident. There should be a moment when you take a wrong turn and find yourself somewhere lovely. The Manor House has that in abundance. It rewards wandering.

The suite itself had the sort of character you hope for in a place like this: generous, warm, individual and comfortable without feeling overly staged. There was a welcome pack of champagne and chocolates, which is always a good start. The room felt like somewhere to properly retreat to, not simply a place to sleep between stops.

And then there was the bed.

Hotel beds are a peculiar business. Some are clearly designed by people who believe the human spine is a theoretical concept. Others are so over-padded that you wake up feeling as if you have been slowly absorbed by marshmallow.

This one was excellent. I lay supine on what was probably the most comfortable bed I have slept in for a long time. That is not a throwaway line. It is, for those of us who have endured enough hotel mattresses to develop opinions on them, extremely important.

Dinner that evening was a short walk to The Castle Inn, which sits within the wider orbit of the Manor House estate. The village also deserves your time. It is a place of stone cottages, little details, gardens in flower and old walls. In the early evening, when the tourists have gone and dusk is in full flow, the village quietens, with just the intermittent chatter and soft glow from the Inn, it takes on a very romantic character.

The meal began with a very friendly welcome from the staff. I opted for the Wye Valley asparagus, locally foraged wild garlic and nettles, cashew nuts and Manor Garden bitter leaves. This is the sort of starter that sounds as though it has been assembled by someone who knows each hedgerow personally and it had exactly the freshness and earthiness you would hope for.

The main was pan-roasted lamb rump with cabbage leaf stuffed with spiced lamb, courgette, locally foraged wild garlic and romesco. Add a couple of glasses of red and the whole evening took on that lovely, gently blurred quality that tells you a hotel stay is doing its job.

Back at The Manor House that evening, the bar continued the theme. A serious selection of wines and whiskies is one of those small but vital signals that a hotel understands its audience. Not everyone wants to end the evening with a complicated cocktail that arrives under a glass dome filled with smoke. Sometimes you just want a proper drink, a comfortable chair, low light and the sense that no one is in a rush to move you along. The Manor House understands this.

That, really, is the strength of the place. It does not feel like a hotel trying to impress you every three minutes. It simply is impressive. There is a confidence to that. The building, the village, the rooms, the food, the bar, the grounds - they all work together without leaning too heavily on each other.

That morning, seeing the Lotus parked at the hotel with a light dusting of dew meant that the rest of my day was also going to be pretty special. The surrounding roads add another dimension. This is not big-sky, open-road country. It is tighter, prettier and more intricate than that. The Emira suits it because it does not need absurd speeds to feel engaging.

The steering speaks clearly, the chassis feels composed and the car has that rare ability to make a modest road feel much more interesting. In many modern performance cars, you need a circuit, a derestricted autobahn or an unusually relaxed attitude towards your driving licence before the thing wakes up. The Lotus feels awake immediately.

The Emira has theatre, but it also has enough civility to make a weekend away feel plausible. You still have to pack with some intelligence, obviously. This is not a Range Rover. You do not simply throw in half a house and hope for the best. But for one person and a properly curated escape, it works.

The Emira against the honeyed stone and wisteria of The Manor House looked sensational. Not restrained, not subtle, not remotely apologetic – just sensational. There is a place for discreet luxury, certainly. There is also a place for turning up in something that looks as though it has escaped from a concept sketch and then finding, by complete accident, that it matches the flowers.

In my mind, the best hotel stays are not simply about linen thread count, dinner menus or whether the bathroom lighting is flattering after 10pm. They are about how a place makes you feel while you are there, and what you remember afterwards.

I will remember the smell of old wood and stone inside The Manor House. I will remember trying to find the room through a maze of corridors with growing uncertainty. I will remember the asparagus, the lamb, the red wine and the whisky selection. I will remember Castle Combe in soft light, looking almost too perfect to be real.

And of course I will remember the purple Lotus.

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