Sluttery Travels: The Pig Hotel, Hampshire

If I was to list my interests, porkstuffs and boutique hotels would both rate very highly. Which is better? Bacon or swanky hotel? Argh! Don't make me choose! The Pig Hotel in Hampshire cleverly marries the two together so I don't have to decide which I like more.

Let's start with the pig first. The Pig offer a lot of pork on their menu (as you'd hope, really), but it's not just a roast dinner and a bacon sandwich.

"Piggy bits" are listen on the menu at £3.50 a pop. They include crackling and pig's ears and pork features heavily throughout the menus. The rest of the menu is a little foraging feast. Ingredients are grown in the gorgeous walled garden and sourced from the New Forest. Everything organic, everything carefully cooked and turned into a very tasty meal.

Now this is a very pretty potting shed. I'd grow veg if I had a potting shed like that. (I'm more likely to turn something like that into a gin and writing den, aren't I?)

The hotel itself has just as much attention to detail. Roll-top baths, snuggly double beds and flatscreens throughout. There's a spa as well!

You also get a choice between staying in the house, or the stables.. There's a family room with bunk beds (bagsy top bunk) and they very kindly warn that their rates are going up ever so slightly and will be starting at just £129 per night from September. (Best to give them a call - the website suggests that they have no rooms in 2013, but we've called to check and they definitely have!)

I really like what The Pig are doing. They're making the most of a beautiful location, offering simple but decent food in a gorgeous setting and not charging the earth for it. How can you argue with a boutique hotel that does all that while feeding you crackling?