The Manor House

The Manor House is a cream-painted Victorian villa on Tynwald Road, tall sash windows set in blue-grey surrounds and a bay front either side of the door. It works as a guest house now, but the generous scale of the original rooms is what registers first.

A gravel drive curves in past lawn and planting to a porch with a bench beside it. Three storeys, symmetrical, decorated stonework along the eaves above the top windows, and everything kept in good order.

Armchairs drawn up to the bay

The sitting rooms are traditional rather than styled: cream carpet, armchairs pulled round to the window, a fireplace, potted palms crowding one bay. A round table for two sits in another. Breakfast is cooked and served downstairs, black pudding and all, and there is an open-plan kitchen serving the house.

From four-poster to skylight

The rooms vary, which is the pleasure of a house this old. One has a brass-and-iron bedstead with Tiffany-style lamps either side. Another has a four-poster made up in cream. A third looks out through a bay window over open country. Up under the roof is a pine-headboard room with a skylight and sloping walls. Some rooms share a bathroom, others are en suite with a walk-in shower, and one is a studio with its own kitchenette and dining table.

The lawn and the summerhouse

Behind the house is a real garden: mown grass running to a stone boundary wall, a blue-painted summerhouse with double doors and a sofa inside, and a hot tub on decking beside it.

Into Peel

The house sits on the edge of Peel, with the harbour, the castle on St Patrick’s Isle and Fenella Beach below it all lying west of here.

A base for

Walkers, families spread across several rooms, and anyone who would rather sleep in a house than a chain bedroom.