Few pleasures are as great as breakfast delivered to your room, served atop the thousand-thread-count sheets of a hotel bed. But the feeling is extra sweet on December 25th, when you’ve got an entire day stretching out ahead of you and not a single obligation.
This is my idea of festive heaven. For the last three years, I’ve eschewed the Christmas chaos and familial obligations in search of solitude. I have always been something of a Grinch, but after my mum died when I was 31 years old, I gave up on Christmas entirely. The first year I spent it alone, I hid away in the Worcestershire countryside in a luxury shepherd’s hut with its own wood-fired tub and enclosed garden for my dog. My day was filled with dog walks, long lazy baths outdoors, reading by the log burner and a dinner of home-cooked steak and chips scoffed on the sofa in front of the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special. It was, by all accounts, the best Christmas I’d had in years – and the beginning of a new tradition of festive self-care.
Since then, I’ve Christmassed in Portugal’s Algarve, waking to swim in the pool of the Hilton Vilamoura on December 25th, before ordering eggs for breakfast and walking the dog on the soft sand beneath the rusty-red cliffs of Praia da Falésia. And this Christmas, I’m escaping to Orkney, where I’ll hunker down in a cottage on low-lying Sanday to spend the festive period beneath skies that tease opportunities for aurora spotting.
Whether you’ve always dreamt of making Christmas a solo escape or if you just feel like doing something different this year, these are the best places to spend Christmas alone in the UK.
The best places to spend Christmas alone in the UK
