Large group accommodation in Yorkshire

The choice is widest in the Dales. The western dales around Skipton, Grassington and up through Wharfedale into Wensleydale are big-house country: working farms, old halls, and a host of the kind of village with a butcher and two pubs. It is walking territory first and foremost, from a gentle riverside mile to the Three Peaks if the group is that way inclined, and the run in from the M6 or the A1 is short enough not to eat the Friday night. To the east, the North York Moors are quieter and more open, all heather and big skies, with Helmsley and the market towns along the southern edge making a good base. The Vale of York sits between the two, flat and fast off the A1, and it suits a group converging from several directions at once. Yorkshire has a coast too, and a fine one, but for a big group it usually comes down to the Dales for range or the Moors for quiet.

If the group cannot agree on much, the Dales are the safe bet. This is the part of Yorkshire with the deepest run of genuinely large houses, from farmhouses knocked through into something rambling to halls built for a crowd. The choice runs from Skipton and Wharfedale in the south up through Wensleydale, and that is where you find the grandest houses of the lot. What you are buying is space, and it is the one thing a big group can never have too much of.

There is a particular kind of Yorkshire property that answers the too-big-for-one-house problem outright: the estate. A grand hall with a few cottages in its grounds, or a farm where the barns have been converted one by one, lets a large group take the whole site and stay on one patch of ground instead of booking three places twenty minutes apart. The biggest of them stretches into the thirties. The one catch is that you usually book each part separately rather than in a single go. What you get in return is everyone in the same grounds, sharing a kitchen table when it suits and slipping back to their own cottage when it does not. And if the group would honestly rather stay under one roof, the houses built to take 12 or 20 are the sensible place to begin.

A hot tub is rarely the reason a group picks Yorkshire, but it is a good way to end a day that started on a hill. A few of these houses have one, more of them out in the Dales than anywhere else, usually set up to face something worth looking at. It is not standard kit, so if the tub matters, filter for it and book the house that actually has one rather than hoping.