As mentioned, we have friends who live in Basingstoke and 2023 marked a milestone birthday for one of them so a group of us descended upon the northern Hampshire town to head out for a meal. My wife and I had actually come up the night before and taken a walk through Basingstoke, found a fabulous little gaming pub/café, then looked around Milestones Museum near our hotel in the morning before popping along to Oakley Hall, but that’s for another post.

We arrived early enough at the hotel to amble up the path from the road to its entrance and this gave me a chance to take some photos. With it being February there was a cool dampness in the air and not a lot of greenery on the trees, but it all made for some pleasantly atmospheric views.

As you can see, Oakley Hall is fairly quiet and isolated in the countryside just outside Basingstoke. The existing building dates to the late eighteenth century, replacing other buildings in and around the area going back at least another five centuries prior. There’s a connection with another location we’ve visited in the past, this being The Vyne, as the current building was erected on the instructions of Wither Bramston (great name) after his marriage to Mary, one of the Chute family who owned the Vyne from the seventeenth century onwards.

Now, you might look at the photos below and think to yourself “I didn’t come here for a review of Oakley Hall to see pictures of moss or lichens!” and hopefully part of that is because you’ve forgotten that I’ve already explained that this isn’t a review. I also take photos, and I’m also on Mastodon, and this means I’m legally required to take photos of moss and lichens. It’s in the Mastodon charter. You can check that out for yourself.

We now reached the entrance to Oakley Hall and made our way inside to wait for the rest of our group to turn up where we enjoyed a quick drink first. Quick maybe, cheap no.

As for the meal, because there were a group of us we’d been told ahead of time we needed to make our choices, so that wasn’t ideal and somewhat puzzling for a restaurant. We’d much rather have perused the menu on the day and chosen. This pre-choosing then led to some of the food feeling like it had been prepared well in advance in terms of texture and temperature. None of it was bad, but none of it was really good either. Our Basingstoke friends who’d arranged this and who’d dined there before were perfectly happy with it all and that’s largely all that matters for the occasion but in private chats with others of us who’d attended we all came away from it feeling that it was average at absolute best. One of the reasons I don’t tend to write reviews, though, is that expectations, likes, and experiences differ from person to person the world over so they can tend towards the pointlessness.