garsdale-cottages

Imported from chobbledotcom/garsdale-cottages (AGENTS.md). Install upstream with npx skills add chobbledotcom/garsdale-cottages. Copyright stays with the author.

Voice & Tone

This site has a distinct voice: dry, plain-spoken, sceptical of marketing-speak, recognisably northern without dialect cosplay. It's how a Dales cottage owner might write about their own place - not how a copywriter would write it for them. The owners here are real people (Paul at Roger Pot; Jack and Loraine at The Old Cart House) and the copy should read like something they could plausibly have written themselves.

This is a guide, not a template. Slavish application is what makes copy sound generated.

Read this first: the aim is search ranking

This is a marketing site. Its job is to rank in search for holiday cottages in Garsdale and the Yorkshire Dales and bring in bookings. Voice serves that goal. It never overrides it. A page that reads beautifully but ranks for nothing has failed at the only thing it exists to do.

The known failure mode of applying a voice like this is quietly deleting the keywords a page ranks for - "holiday cottage", "Yorkshire Dales", "dog friendly", the place names - and shortening pages until they are too thin to rank. Losing keywords to make a sentence sound nicer is not an acceptable trade. It is the worst thing you can do to this site.

Hard rules - these override every principle below

1. A rewrite must never reduce keyword coverage. Before you touch a page, list the keywords it already carries (the service terms, the property name, the place names). Every one of them must still be present afterwards, at no lower frequency. When in doubt, count: the after-count for each target term must be equal to or higher than the before-count.
2. Never shorten a page to apply the voice. Word count is content, and content ranks. If a rewrite comes out shorter than the original, it has lost ground - add specifics until it matches or exceeds the original length. Thin pages (under ~250 words for a property or landing page) do not rank.
3. Protected elements keep their keywords, always. The meta_title, the meta_description, every heading (#/##), link and anchor text, and the first paragraph carry the most SEO weight. The voice does not get to soften, shorten, or de-keyword any of these. If voice and keyword conflict here, keyword wins, every time.
4. The voice lives between the keywords, not instead of them. "Farrier's Cottage is a dog friendly holiday cottage in Garsdale, in the Yorkshire Dales National Park" keeps the keywords and the voice. "Farrier's Cottage sits at the quiet end of the dale" sounds nicer and ranks for nothing. Always reach for the first kind of sentence.

Target keywords this site ranks for (preserve and use naturally - this is not exhaustive): holiday cottage / holiday cottages, self-catering, Garsdale, Yorkshire Dales / Yorkshire Dales National Park, Sedbergh, Hawes, dog friendly / pet friendly, sleeps six, woodburning stove, stone cottage, walks, red squirrels, Settle-Carlisle, Garsdale Station, book direct, plus the property name on every property page.

The trap to avoid

Plain-spoken northern voices are mostly people talking, spontaneously. Their rhetorical patterns - punchy fragments, lists of three with a comic third, deflating one-liners - work because they're spoken, not written. Lift those patterns straight into website copy and you've turned spontaneous wit into ad copy. You can hear the agency.

The northern-ness in this site should come from content (real rooms, real furniture, real places, real distances, real wildlife) and word choice (a few quid, a fair bit, hold up well, round here) - not from sentence structure.

The WhatsApp test

Read the line out loud. Could Paul, or Jack and Loraine, type it on their phone between jobs? If it has a copywriter's structure - a punchy fragment, a parallel-list closer, a one-line summary that "lands" - no, they wouldn't. Take the polish off.

Source corpus

Don't lean on any single voice - that becomes a tribute act. The shared DNA is plain words, real specifics, and no performance:

• Alfred Wainwright - the Pictorial Guides and Walks in Limestone Country. Dry, precise, opinionated, and the rare example of this register written rather than spoken
• Hannah Hauxwell - Too Long a Winter and the follow-up documentaries; a Dales voice with no performance in it at all
• Fred Dibnah - the BBC documentaries. The voice for craft, materials, and proper specificity ("a good bit of mortar", "a proper old engine")
• James Herriot's farmers - the dialogue, not the narration; plain working speech from these exact hills
• The Dalesman - the magazine's contributor pieces, for unhurried written prose about this area
• Sean Dyche - press conferences; plain-speaking and sceptical of polish
• Coronation Street - for plain working dialogue

When stuck, don't generate - read one of these. But remember most of them are talking. Don't import their punchlines.

Principles

1. First person where it makes sense

First person is more honest than corporate "we", and small owners talk like that. But first person is not a licence to drop the keyword - keep both. "We've run Roger Pot as a holiday cottage for years, and we live on site in the barn next door" beats both the corporate "This property offers self-catering accommodation" and the de-keyworded "We've been here for years". Where the owner isn't named on the page, plain third person is fine - it's how the site mostly reads.

2. Specifics over abstractions

A grandfather clock in the dining room, not "characterful interiors". The River Clough, not "a nearby river". Wensleydale Creamery, Farfield Mill, Danny Bridge, real years (1675, the 1845 survey), real distances (Sedbergh 7 miles). The voice gets its credibility from being specific. The property photos are full of usable specifics - look at them before writing.

3. Plain word choice

"A few quid" not "significant savings". "Hold up well" not "remain in excellent condition". "Somewhere dry to put the bikes" not "secure cycle storage solutions". If you wouldn't say it to a guest standing in the kitchen, don't write it.

Exception: the target keywords stay even if they're not kitchen talk. "Self-catering" and "holiday cottage accommodation" aren't how anyone chats, but they're what people search for, so they stay (worked into a sentence an owner could plausibly say). The hard rules at the top win over this principle.

4. Looseness over polish

Long sentences with sub-clauses. Hedges ("around fifteen minutes", "one of the better places"). Asides in the middle of a thought. Sometimes a paragraph just stops because there's nothing else to say. The voice gets its texture from looseness, not from rhythm.

The opposite - short, polished sentences with parallel structure - is what marketing copy sounds like.

5. Complete sentences, no punchline closers

The voice never uses sentence fragments. Every sentence has a subject and a verb. Fragments masquerading as sentences - "No booking fees, no fuss." or "The lot." or "Pure Dales." - don't belong in the house voice, even when they sound emphatic or efficient. They're a copywriter's tic.

This applies anywhere in the copy, not just at paragraph ends. Rewrite fragments by absorbing them into the surrounding sentence, or by giving them their own subject and verb:

• Bad: "The cottage keeps its original features. Thick walls, slate floors, oak beams."
• Good: "The cottage keeps its original features - thick stone walls, slate floors and oak beams - and they still do their job."

Even grammatically-complete sentences shouldn't be used as cinematic punchline closers - things like "The dale does the rest." or "And the rest is history." A complete sentence is necessary but not sufficient; the structure also has to read like prose, not like a tagline.

Specific patterns to avoid:

• Single-word or fragment closers: "The lot." / "No fuss." / "Simple as that."
• Multi-fragment summaries: "Three bedrooms. Woodburner. Dog welcome."
• Cinematic one-line summaries: "The fells do the rest." / "And the rest is history."
• Lists of three where the third item is comic or undercutting.
• The X / X / X - Y structure: "Not an agency, not a call centre, not a chatbot - Paul."
• The "and yes, there's WiFi" handle-the-objection move.

Bullets and headings are exempt - they're not sentences. The "At a glance" lists stay as lists.

6. Trust the reader

Don't explain the joke. Don't justify the claim. Don't repeat yourself. The voice is economical because it assumes intelligence on the other end.

Phrase pool (sparingly)

Words and turns of phrase that fit the voice when they appear naturally - never as 1:1 substitution:

• "a few quid"
• "a fair bit" / "a fair walk"
• "hold up well"
• "round here" / "up the dale" / "up here"
• "somewhere to come back to"
• "worth staying up for"

Build this up over time as more copy gets written. One or two per page is plenty.

No-go list

Burnt out by other northern brands and ad campaigns. Avoid:

• "owt" / "nowt"
• "our kid"
• "champion" (as adjective)
• "ay up" / "by 'eck" / "ee bah gum"
• "proper" as intensifier ("proper good")
• "dead" as intensifier ("dead happy")
• "me" for "my" outside quoted speech
• Phonetic accent spelling ("'appy", "summat", "fella")
• "honest as the day is long" / "salt of the earth" / "no nonsense" - clichés about northern character that signal the writer isn't northern
• Estate-agent-isms about the Dales: "nestled", "boasts", "a hidden gem", "your home from home", "the perfect base"

These can appear inside quotation marks if a guest review says them. They don't belong in house voice.

Process

0. List the keywords the current page carries and note its word count. This is your floor - you are not allowed to come in under it on either. (Skip only when writing a brand-new page with no prior version.)
1. Write the page in plain English first, keeping every keyword from step 0 in place. Don't reach for the voice yet.
2. Read it aloud. Mark every sentence that sounds like it could be on a holiday-letting agency's brochure.
3. Apply the WhatsApp test to each marked sentence: could the owner type this on their phone? If not, take the polish off - usually by lengthening the sentence, adding a hedge, or breaking up a too-neat structure. Lengthening is good; never cut a keyword to fix the rhythm - reword around it.
4. Read aloud again. If you smirk, pull back further.
5. Recount the keywords and the word count. Each target term must be present at least as often as in step 0, and the page must be at least as long. If either dropped, you've regressed the page - fix it before shipping.

Where to use it

Apply the voice to the connective tissue, never at the cost of a keyword:

• Property page descriptions (the main markdown prose block)
• The about page and location pages
• Walks, wildlife and things-to-do pages
• Homepage section intros (not the SEO-heavy hero)
• Transitions and link text (keep keyword-rich anchor text; "walks in every direction" linking to /walks/ is a better link than "click here")

Where NOT to use it

• "At a glance" lists, features lists and frontmatter
• Safety notes, water-supply notes, access notes - anywhere ambiguity costs the reader clarity
• Prices, contact details and form labels
• meta_title and meta_description - these are keyword-first
• The book-direct block - it's shared boilerplate across property pages and stays consistent

Inconsistency between pages is fine. Different pages have different jobs.

Anti-patterns

The specific failure modes of trying-too-hard:

• Fragment "sentences" - "The lot." / "No fuss." / "Dog welcome." Anywhere in copy, not just at paragraph end. See principle 5.
• Cinematic one-liners - "The fells do the rest." / "And the rest is history."
• The deflating undercut - used once it's a flourish; used as a pattern it's marketing.
• The rule-of-three list - don't do it earnestly.
• The handle-the-objection move - "and yes, there's WiFi" / "and yes, dogs really are welcome". Pure copywriter device.
• Punchline-delivery dashes - "Not an agency, not a call centre - Paul." A hyphen used as an ordinary explanatory aside ("the utility room has a flagged floor - useful for boots and a damp dog") is fine. House style: use single hyphens with spaces around them. Never use double hyphens or em-dashes. Older pages still carry em-dashes; normalise them whenever a page gets rewritten, never at the cost of a keyword.
• Tag questions on every paragraph - even one per page is often too many. Use only when it genuinely lets the reader in.
• Trying to be funny - the voice is dry, not jokey. If a line gets a laugh, fine. If it's for the laugh, cut it.
• Editorialising on top of facts - "the sort of place that...", "which is exactly what makes it...", "which is fair enough", "proper boots", "proper meat", "a proper greengrocer". The underlying failure is adding a writer's commentary onto a fact that would stand fine on its own. The fact does the work; the added gloss is the giveaway that a copywriter is present. Just state the fact. Describe the food, list what they stock, say where it is. Don't tell the reader it's "the sort of place" or that something is "proper" - that's leaning over the reader's shoulder to point at things. "Proper" as an intensifier is the laziest version of this, and it stacks up fast across a site.
• Generic "northern" markers as a substitute for voice - anyone can sprinkle in "a few quid". The voice has to live in content and structure, not just word choice.