Self Catering Searcher
A UK-wide guide to self-catering holidays — cottages, apartments, chalets and houses across Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England. Whether you plan to stay in a Highland glen, a Cornish fishing village or a Welsh market town, here's an honest starting point for choosing where to go.
What "self catering" actually means
A self-catering holiday means you book a whole property — cottage, apartment, chalet or house — rather than a hotel room, and look after your own meals and day-to-day living, the same as you would at home. It suits families, groups and anyone who'd rather have their own kitchen, their own front door, and their own pace than a fixed hotel routine. Most self-catering owners deal with enquiries and bookings directly, so it also tends to mean a more personal, less corporate way of arranging a UK break.
Choose your region
Scotland
From the Highlands and Islands to the Borders — glens, lochs and a genuinely wild coastline.
Wales
Coastal Pembrokeshire, the Gwynedd mountains, and the market towns of the Marches.
Northern Ireland
The Antrim coast, the Fermanagh lakelands, and six counties with a lot packed into a small area.
South West England
Cornwall and Devon's coastline, plus Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire.
South East England & London
Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, the Chilterns, and the city itself.
Central & Northern England
The Peak District, the Lakes, Yorkshire, East Anglia and the Midlands.
How to choose where to stay
Start with what you actually want out of the trip rather than the map: a coastal walk means Cornwall, Pembrokeshire or the Antrim coast; hills and lochs point towards the Highlands, Snowdonia or the Lakes; a market-town base with easy day trips suits somewhere like the Cotswolds, the Yorkshire Dales fringes or the Scottish Borders. Distance matters more with self-catering than with a one-off hotel night, since you're usually there for a week or more — a shorter drive leaves more of the holiday for the holiday.
The directory archive
Self Catering Searcher ran for years as a full UK self-catering directory, and that directory is preserved here as an archive: 71 counties and 801 towns, with the owners' own descriptions of their cottages, apartments and houses. It's a genuinely useful picture of what UK self-catering stock looked like, and a good way to see which towns had properties worth looking at.
The archive was captured in January 2022. Prices, availability and booking details have been removed, because those go out of date immediately and the properties may no longer be let — treat it as a reference, not a list of current offers.
About this guide
Alongside the archive we keep short, honest regional guides rather than a live booking system — availability and owners change constantly, so we don't try to track them. For finding an actual property to book today, we'd point you to a dedicated self-catering booking site; this site is here to help you work out where in the UK to look, and to keep the original directory available.