Fit for a king

HELEN and Brian Heaton must have been as surprised as anyone when Castlewood House, their 12-bed guesthouse in Dingle, was last week named the sixth best hotel in the world by TripAdvisor.

The 2012 Travellers’ Choice Awards, based on travellers’ ratings of thousands of properties on the TripAdvisor website, ranked Castlewood ahead of resorts in Morocco and Zermatt, brands like Orient Express, the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur and Chicago’s luxury Elysian Hotel.

“Halfway through my whirlwind tour of Ireland and this was the first place I actually relaxed and took a deep breath,” gushed the latest reviewer as we went to press, a visitor from Colorado.