Ragdale Hall - Melton Mowbray - Sept 2012

Our honeymoon! For the first part of our honeymoon, we returned to the Wyndham Grand Chelsea Harbour hotel in London, reviewed previously, for a few nights in London and fabulous food at Gordon Ramsay's at Claridges and Rhodes W1.

Then it was on to Ragdale Hall spa hotel in Leicestershire. We stayed for 7 nights here which included one treatment each per day and breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Ragdale Hall in an idependantly owned health spa which has won many awards. We discovered that most people staying there were returning guests which just goes to show how good it is. They don't seem to advertise much as they must get so much repeat business!

As soon as we arrived, the porters helped us with our luggage and parked our car for us. Check-in was very smooth running with lots of staff on hand for the many guests arriving. We were taken through to the garden room to fill in our health forms for the spa, and we were given our timetable detailing all our spa treatments and lunch and dinner times. We were then given a tour of the ground floor, the staff are all very friendly and welcoming. We were given our room key, and the porters delivered our luggage up for us. We were advised to change straight into our towelling robes and to start relaxing!

We had booked a superior room and we were not dissapointed with the turret room overlooking the pool to the rear. It is a good sized room, with a superking size bed and a beautful modern ensuite bathroom.

We changed into our robes (slippers not provided), and went downstairs to decide what to do. There is the garden room cafe in the centre, with a conservatory overlooking the outdoor pool. There are lots of relaxing lounge areas, including a quiet lounge at the front of the house, where you will find Rags the friendly resident cat! There is the swimming area, with a main pool, an exercise pool where all the aqua classes take place, and a jacuzzi. Then you have the steam area with 6 different steam and sauna rooms to choose from with different temperatures, lighting and fragrance. There is also a candle pool which is like an underground pool, and also the pool that leads outside. There are a fair amount of sunloungers and chairs around these areas, although you do find the usual trouble of people reserving them all day with their towels!

The beauty area is at the other side of the building with, I would guess, near on a hundred treatment rooms! The waiting area has plenty of magazines to choose from, you never have long to wait though as the treatment times are very well devised. There is a seperate nail bar, and also a new Beauty Express room with no appointment needed treatments. The reception staff and all the therapists are really great, friendly and helpful. All the treatments I tried were amazing, especially the Reflexology.

There is also a gym and two fitness class rooms with a very thorough programme of classes. We only tried the gym though as we were on a relaxing honeymoon!

On to the food. As I said, you get a timetable with your mealtimes on which ensures the dining room never gets too busy, we found we had a lot of early dinners scheduled, but staff are happy to change times if you ask. Lunch is a choice of 2 starters served to your table, followed by a buffet lunch and then a choice of puddings. The menu's are labelled with a score of 3 regarding how calorific each option is, 1 being the low calorie option, 3 being the highest. Dinner is all served at your table with a bigger choice of usually 3 starters, 5 mains and 4 desserts. Breakfast we didn't find quite as enjoyable as it is served in your room from 7.45am, so no lay ins! Also there is no choice of a cooked breakfast, there is an extensive menu, see pic attached, and we tried many options, but a nice rack of hot toast would have been marvelous! I can understand why they do it like this as hot food would go cold with so many rooms to deliver to.

We cannot rate the staff highly enough, everyone we encountered was happy, helpful and proffesional. When you check-out at the end of your stay there is an optional service charge which you can make and we were very happy to do that for the exceptional service we recieved. The check-out process is just as smooth running as the check-in, with the porters collecting our luggage for us and loading it into our car. There is the option to stay on in the spa area until later in the day if you so wish, even though check-out is at 11am.

We would recommend Ragdale Hall to anyone. It is the perfect relaxing break in the UK where weather is not a factor as you can sit by the pool and pretend you are by the mediterranean! Every need is catered for so you don't need to lift a finger. You can spend all day in your robes if you wish, even for dinner so you don't even need to do much packing! Just to prove how good it is, we have already returned once and are going back again for our wedding anniversary!