We were lucky enough to have a rare set of quads born on the farm at the weekend – 4 nice strong lambs. Mum is feeding them all and we supplement some of them with a bottle. We thought it was all over after three and were very surprised to see another shortly afterwards!
quad lambs at Broadgate Farm
Last night was the awards dinner for the local tourism awards – we won the award for the best self catering provider! We are absolutely delighted, most of the cottages are over 3 years old and we do work hard not just to keep them up to spec but also to improve them for our guests. It is great to have this recognised!
I have just finished our Guide to What is on in the Beverley area over the coming year – the early part of the year is in detail but some venues/events have yet to release details. I will update this later in the year. The Guide is available in all of our cottages and also for download on our website.
http://www.broadgatefarmcottages.co.uk/calendar-of-events-east-yorkshire.html
Blacktoft Sands have released their dates for March – April – a great place to visit and these mini courses are such good value. The Spring and Summer Open Days are also well worth a visit.
Improve your birdwatching
Wed 13th March, Sat 16th March, Wed 24th April, Sat 27th April, Wed 15th and Sat 18th May Please book in advance. Event charge £4 per session or £10 for attending all three (one per month).
Bird Photography for beginners
Wed 10th April and Sat 4th May
10am to 12:30pm Please book in advance. Places limited. Event charge £10 per person
Bird Photography for Improvers
Sat 1st June
10am – 1pm Please book in advance. Places limited. Event charge £12.50 per person
Spring Open Day
Sunday 21st April
10am to 4pm
Fun for everyone on this FREE day out, with guided walks, guides in hides, light refreshments, children’s activities and RSPB sales. Visit the reserve to welcome back the fantastic avocets, marsh harriers and bitterns as they return for the breeding season.
Drop in throughout the day. Free entry to the reserve.
Summer Open Day – celebrating 40 years at Blacktoft.
Sunday 16th June
10am to 4pm.
The biggest event at Blacktoft Sands this year! Join in the family fun, with guided walks, experts in the hides, fun children’s activities, light refreshments and RSPB Sales. Watch and listen to the sights and sounds of the reedbed whilst avocets, marsh harriers and many other fantastic birds are busy raising their families.
Drop in anytime. Free entry to the reserve.
For further information or to book a place on any of the events please contact the reserve office on 01405 704665 or email blacktoft.sands@rspb.org.uk
The Granary is our stunning 3 bedroom 5 star Gold Award cottage – a really special and luxurious place to stay! See our virtual tour
We have struggled to show just how lovely this cottage is but I think that our new tour will really help to show what a gem it is. You can choose to wander around the rooms or there are some shortcuts below the main image to take you directly into each room. Have a play with the controls – you can spin around, look down to see more details or up to see the beamed ceilings. It is easier to use the directional arrows at the bottom of the image to “walk”, you can also use your mouse but if you are not careful the mouse can teleport you next door!
Highlights of the Granary 
What’s more if our 2 bedroom cottages are booked for your dates in the run up to Christmas we have some special low occupancy rates (1-2 bedrooms).
We are really excited about our new Google Virtual Tours, most of you will be familiar with Google Street View well now you can come inside!
These interactive tours let you wander around the cottages from room to room, you can even spin round to see what is behind and you can look up and down.
So many of our guests say that the cottages looked great on the website but when they got here it was even better than they had expected. Still photos have their limitations and the virtual tours should help you get a feel for exactly what it will be like should you choose to join us or try a different cottage next time.
We were very lucky – the tours were shot over two days in early November and the sun shone for us most of the time!
We get visitors to our website from all over the world – we have a statistics package on the server that tells us where the visitors have come from, it is just in general terms giving us an idea of how many visitors from each country but it makes for interesting reading.
I spotted a new country on the list the other day -PERU! isn’t it amazing how people find you. This month there are visitors from 58 countries.
Most of them are very welcome but we did have an unwelcome visitor to the website this month – located in the Russian Federation someone tried (with an automated system) over 30000 times to break my password and log into the site. Luckily they didn’t manage to get in, it was all part of a massive wave of hacking with groups hacking and replacing websites with anti Isreal messages in protest at the action in the Middle East.
What a lovely sunny day in East Yorkshire – October often brings some nice weather and we certainly deserve some after all that rain in September.
Short breaks available in October even some half term availability but don’t wait too long! http://www.broadgatefarmcottages.co.uk/yorkshire-late-availability-holidays.html
We do have the Stables available this weekend – you could visit Hull Fair and Beverley Food Festival! Hope to see you soon!
We are blessed with a great range of restaurants close to the cottages and on October 7th the prestigious Beverley Food Festival which is now in its 7th year hosts a number of different activities including food workshops, bands and entertainment.
A family day of food festivities and fun with around 80 stalls selling local produce, cookery theatre, street entertainment, local produce BBQ, competitions and much more.
It’s a great day out – why not join us? http://broadgatefarmcottages.co.uk/pdf/availability.pdf
