How we walk it

We call the ground everything a hotel stands on and everything it stands beside: the field it cuts, the roof it keeps hives on, the forest that starts at its fence, the water in front of it. A city park behind a wall counts, because for a building with no soil of its own that park is the whole answer, and saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise.

Each entry carries a paragraph and four notes. The first note says who and what lives or grows on the ground. The second says where that keeps to, because a reef, a pasture and a hedgerow all hold to particular parts of a site. The third says what the hotel does about it, including doing nothing. The fourth is a question worth asking before you arrive.

We never promise a meeting. Animals are not scheduled, and a guide that says you will see something is selling a thing it does not own. For the same reason we give no advice about approaching, feeding or photographing anything living. If you want to know how to behave on a site, the people who manage that site are the ones to ask, and they will tell you.

There are no Latin names here, no head counts, no areas and no species lists. Those belong in a field guide, and we are not writing one. What we can do is describe the arrangement of a place in plain words, so that a reader with English as a second language can picture it without a dictionary and without a table of figures.

We also give no hotel an environmental grade. Whether a property is run well by the standards of its industry is not something we can judge from published material, and a guide that hands out green marks is guessing. We report what is done on the ground, and we let that stand without a score attached to it.

ASK ABOUT THIS is preparation, not complaint. It marks the one thing that is easier to settle before arrival than after: a path that closes, a crossing that depends on the tide, a chain address that is easy to confuse with another. None of it is a fault, and none of it is a warning about the hotel.

LAST WALKED is the month and year when we last opened the material behind an entry and checked that it still held. It is not a claim that we stayed there. Ground changes slowly, but operators, names and access arrangements do not, so the date tells you how old the reading is.

Our material comes from published sources: hotel and estate websites, park and reserve information, writing on landscape and farming, and press coverage. We do not publish stay reports, and we do not write as though we had been a guest. Where a source is unclear about a name or an operator, we say what we could confirm and leave the rest alone.

What never appears here: prices, star ratings, scores, availability, booking links and paid placement. Nothing on this site can be bought, and no hotel has been asked for permission or payment. A hotel is welcome to send a correction, and a correct one will be made whether or not we like the tone of it.

An international guide has a Casino Hotels section because four large Canadian resorts sit on ground worth describing: a made island in a river, the rim of a gorge, a delta bank and a lake forest. We describe that ground and nothing else. The gaming floor is not covered, not assessed and not recommended, and no page here links to play.