In search of the perfect winter cottage

Good evening.
The first cold snap of the year has seen flurries of snow in parts of the country. For many of us, it’s the perfect excuse to hunker down. If we’re not lucky enough to own a cosy property with an open fire or wood burner, it might send us off in search of the perfect country cottage to rent.
But what defines the perfect winter cottage? It’s a question we set our writer Kevin Rushby.
Kevin’s ideal was formed in Kristiansand in Norway some years ago, when he peeped through the frosty panes of local houses and witnessed a cosy compilation of advent candles, wooden interiors and trays of sugared buns and coffee pots. But he warns that “managing expectations with winter cottages is vital” and reveals that he has, at times, been misled by his own assumptions. Like the time he was offered a friend’s cottage on the North York Moors, only to arrive in a snowstorm and find that it was still in the process of being done up, and where the bottle of wine he had brought with him stubbornly refused to defrost.
He had more success on a recent visit to a cottage in Snowdonia (Eryri), however. Inside the cottage, there was “a slate floor polished by two centuries of Welsh feet, a pair of log burners, two cast-iron baths and a kitchen humming with warmth from an Aga”. Outside: a sheep-cropped lawn, a millstream and nary another dwelling in sight.
That’s the basics covered. But the final ingredient to a cosy winter retreat, once location and warmth are guaranteed, Kevin says, is finding a key to forge fantastic memories. In the notes of the cottage, Kevin read that it was built on top of Wales’s long-defunct gold seam. And it was while on a yomp, inspecting the area’s old gold mines, that Kevin hit pay dirt: “There, stretched out below us is all the riches we could want: the hammered gold of the Mawddach estuary and the Irish Sea, and finally our cottage. It looks, I have to say, just about perfect.”