7 Castle Hill
What Three Words: ///seaside.giraffes.drums
Castle Hill, the old main road to St Austell, branches uphill from Edgcumbe Road. On the left is the Fowey Valley Hotel in what was formerly Upton House.
Upton House was built around the turn of the 18th century and its owners seem always to have provided accommodation to long-term boarders. In 1871 it was owned by William and Louisa Probert, drapers, who had Congregational minister Edward Stevens as their tenant. When retired policeman Joseph Ham and his wife Annie owned the house, Annie was the boarding house keeper and her long-term tenant was Charlotte Dingle, living on her private means amd daughter of timber merchant John Dingle. The Hams and Miss Dingle remained in occupation until 1922, when the house was sold to William Sandry, who worked as both a builder and an egg dealer, suggesting that he kept chickens in his extensive garden.
After William Sandry’s death in 1930, his widow and family continued to run the house as a boarding house for long-term residents and, during the 1950s they began to provide for the growing number of holiday makers that came to Cornwall. This move towards meeting the needs of tourism led Ron Wingfield to buy Upton House in 1960 and convert it into a motel under the name Carotel. His company, Carotel Holidays, also sold caravan accessories. The business was sold to a consortium of investors and was run through the 1960s by Graham and Carole Reid.
The Reids made the hotel and its restaurant a major venue for local people and organisations, directly competing with the Royal Talbot. Staunchly Conservative, the Reid’s held festive events that would now be regarded as in very poor taste. In 1964, they held a ‘Grand Wind of Change Dinner’, echoing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s speech about the decolonisation of Africa. The dinner was to celebrate ‘laying down the white man’s burden’, and the Reid’s requested that diners come in colonial garb. In 1968, they marked the fourth year of Labour Government with a social night in support of their spurious ‘Campaign for the Protection of Harassed Housewives and Overtaxed Breadwinners’.
Cornish Guardian, March 1964
By the 1970s, Tom Hanson had bought out the Reids and his other partners in the consortium and took over the running of the Carotel with his son Richard. The Hansons improved and extended the hotel and restaurant and in 1989 changed its name to the Restormel Lodge Hotel. Moving upmarket, they joined the Best Western group and for some time the restaurant had an Egon Ronay listing. The Hansons sold the hotel to Hunt’s Food Services in 2001 and it was run as a successful business that served business travellers and numerous German tourists on coach holidays seeking the Cornwall of novelist Rosamund Pilcher.
Hunts restored the façade of the hotel to its original appearance and relaunched it as the Fowey Valley Hotel in 2022 as a prelude to putting it up for sale. It was acquired by Hassan Asif’s H&H Hotels, the new owner introducing a policy of selling neither pork nor alcohol in the restaurant and bar. The hotel is 3 Star and has a wide range of rooms and suites.
Walk back along Queen Street to