Slated Hotel and Casino Resort

About the informational pages for the Slated Hotel and Casino Resort, and the Foundation that keeps Wythern House Hotel and Casino Resort.

Why these pages exist

Wythern House Hotel and Casino Resort was raised in 1822 in dressed Yorkshire greenstone over local rubble, on the south rim of the Wythern beck in the northern Dales, as the residence of the Wythern slate-merchant. The slate workings were quarried for one hundred and twenty-two years before the long mid-century retreat closed them in 1936; the house stood quiet through the post-war years and was held briefly as a Methodist meeting house in the late 1940s. The building passed into the keeping of the present Foundation in March 1957 and has been operated continuously as a country-house hotel since the autumn of that year. The hotel has twenty-eight rooms across two ranges, with one restored slate-cutting workshop on the lower-ground floor — the room our long guests refer to as the casino resort floor. These pages are the Foundation’s own description of the hotel and casino resort, written for those who would like to know what they are walking into before they arrive.

We have not commissioned a copywriter, hired a marketing firm, or had the pages tuned for performance. The hotel is small, and the description is small with it. Each page is written by the duty manager and reviewed by a member of the Foundation; the date of last review is recorded at the foot of each page in the manner of a country log.

The Wythern House Foundation

The Foundation was registered in March 1957 by three of the slate-merchant’s descendants with a single object: to hold the house, keep it in honest repair, and run it as a country hotel for as long as the building stands without alteration of character. The Foundation is constituted as a charitable company in England; its accounts are filed annually in Companies House and the Charity Commission register; its trustees take no remuneration for their offices and hold no commercial interest in the hotel’s takings.

The casino resort floor was restored from the Foundation’s own drawings between 2012 and 2014. The room is presented and described as a feature of the property — a working slate-cutting workshop returned to its 1822 finish — and is not held out as a gambling venue. The hotel takes no wagers, holds no player accounts, and receives no commission from any operator. The standing instructions for conduct on the casino resort floor are written and posted at the foot of the staircase, and re-read by the duty manager at the start of each evening service.

How these pages are kept

These informational pages are reviewed in February each year. Where a fact has changed — a room added, a service moved, a rate altered — the change is logged in the Foundation papers and the page amended in the same week. Where a fact is no longer current, the page is taken down rather than left to mislead. The pages do not carry advertising, do not link to gambling operators, and do not place tracking pixels for marketing purposes; the analytics we keep are the ordinary visitor counts of a small hotel website, used for nothing more than estimating how many people are reading.

The text and the line drawings of the house are kept by the Foundation and may be quoted in short for reference or review. The text is not a marketing document; it is the description of a building, and the duty manager would prefer it to read that way. If you find a sentence that does not, please write to her at the address on the contact page.

Those whose names sit at the foot

Chair

Margaret Kerrick — great-great-niece of the original slate-merchant; trustee since 1998, chair since 2017

Treasurer

Dr. Iain Westcote — retired solicitor of Northallerton; trustee since 2009

Building trustee

Helen Mowat — conservation architect; trustee since 2014; led the Cutting Room restoration

House trustee

Robin Adler — former duty manager, 1996–2018; trustee since 2019

Independent trustee

The Reverend Catherine Eames — appointed 2022 to a single five-year term

Duty manager

Sara Hindmarsh — in post since the spring of 2020

The trustees meet four times a year in the library, and once at the close of February to sign the year’s description before it is published.