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On the face of it, the Stag offers a good combination to visitors - a few, smartly furnished rooms over a restaurant by a river. I found the staff unfailingly welcoming and helpful, but rooms are too small, there is no air-con or room fridge, and no rooms have baths. This is essentially a restaurant which offers a few rooms, but they are not cheap. Car-parking is very poor at peak eating times, and you might find there are no spaces. The wi-fi is very slow and imperfect (2Mb), and the local mobile signal is very weak, oscillating between 3G (no good for anything) and a thin 4G signal. So hotspotting was really hit and miss. Clearly the mobile signal is not the hotel’s fault. There is not too much noise from the outside restaurant area except at peak departure times, when I felt behaviour tended towards being too noisy. There is, however, fairly constant background noise from the nearby A3. Breakfast is excellent and served in the restaurant downstairs with plenty of options. I slept well in the comfortable beds, but generally felt that the hotel did not deliver great value for money.

Sadly we only enjoyed the property from about 10pm onwards as we were busy elsewhere at a gathering although we had dropped our bags off about 2pm into our room. The staff were all jolly and friendly. The real ale was good. The breakfast was wonderful. We have a lovely British coupe that we don't like leaving near to cars that bash their doors into us but there is a secret car park near the wheelie bins (down a vicious angled slope that puts off folk I guess) and that provides wonderful parking for 3-4 cars. The room was lovely with a view of the river (albeit somewhat obscured by the diners' tents in the gdn) and the coffee machine was complemented with real milk in a fridge in the corridor. Excellent package.