What came first, and how we check it

An older thing is a single thing on or beside a hotel's ground that was already there when the hotel began: a planted avenue, a well, a cloister, a rampart, an aqueduct, a gorge, a shoreline, a fell. It is a thing, not a former use. What the building itself used to be is a different subject, and we leave it alone.

Three headings carry the description. What is older says what the thing is and what is known about its age. Where it stands puts it in relation to the house, the street or the park. What was built around it says how the hotel arranged itself alongside. The three are meant not to repeat one another.

There are no dates anywhere on this site, and no centuries written as figures. Ages come from published material of very uneven quality, and a number would give that material an authority it has not earned. So we write in words, cautiously, and where nothing reliable exists we say that no one has dated it.

We also do not promise access. Some of these things stand in a closed part of an estate, some in a public park, some on land belonging to a community, and some behind a gate that opens only for stonework. That is why every entry ends by asking rather than by sending you off to look.

For the same reason we do not attach protection or heritage status to anything unless it has been published, and we never claim that a wall, a tree or a garden is the oldest of its kind anywhere. Rankings of that sort are almost always someone's marketing rather than a finding.

Ask to see it is written as preparation, not as a complaint. It names the one question worth putting to the hotel before you arrive, because the answer is often seasonal, and because staff can usually tell you in a sentence what a website cannot.

Looked up gives the month and year we last opened the material behind an entry. It is a note about our reading, not about the hotel, and not a claim that we were standing there.

Material comes from published sources: hotel and operator websites, writing on architecture, gardens and local history, park and municipal information, and the published record around a site. We do not publish stay reports, and nothing here is written from a complimentary night.

What this guide does not publish: prices, star ratings, scores, room counts, availability, booking links, affiliate links and paid placements. Nobody can buy an entry, buy a correction or buy their way out of one.

Casino Hotels is here because four Canadian resorts happen to sit on ground with a long story of its own, and the same rule applies to them as to everything else. The gaming floor is not described, not rated and not linked. If a resort belongs in this guide, it is for the island, the gorge, the river or the shore.