The owner, Val Norton, is a charming, helpful host. She no longer runs the dinner restaurant, but still serves a lovely, full breakfast in a beautiful dining room, with views of the farms and mountains. Val was more than happy to chat with us about sights to see and restaurants to try for dinner. The room was comfortable, with good beds, clean linen, television, coffee/tea service, hair dryer, alarm clock, etc. In addition, a free bottle of her Deeside water was provided in the room each day.I don't know how long ago your person with the bad review stayed there, but we had a totally wonderful experience in May of 2007, and everyone we saw in the diningroom at breakfast seemed equally happy.

I do not know when our friend who says do not stay there was there, however, their experience does not reflect my two stays there.

I found the owners to be extremely friendly and very helpful. The food was above average and the price very reasonable. There are now two self catering cottages available on the site, and they are very nice indeed.

A really good place to stay at a very reasonable price. Suffice to say that the Hotel has a number of guests that return on a regular basis, myself included.

Where to begin? Awful, awful room, the ceiling of which was absolutely crawling with flies. Tiny, poky bathroom, dreadful decor.

The quality of the food was abysmal - let's just say that all the sauces tasted as though they'd come straight out of a packet and what was hilariously called a "cheeseboard" consisted of a bit of sweaty orange cheddar (possibly cut from a catering block) and two cream crackers.

We honestly couldn't wait to leave; the problem with that was that it took ages to track down the owner/manager to ask to check out. We were there on a special offer; he didn't believe us and we had to wrangle to get an accurate -although overpriced - bill.

Really, the whole experience was so grim that we immediately christened the place "Fawlty Towers" and now can laugh about it - in fact, we've related the story of Our Worst Hotel Experience to many people - the flies really were the jewel in the crown of the whole thing.

The only slightly positive thing I can say is that our visit took place a few years ago now, so I can only hope that there is a new management team and chef and that some industrial-strength cleaning has taken place since!