The food is the main course at Janine and Richard Burton’s restaurant-with-rooms. ‘How I wish we had a restaurant anywhere near as good as this where I live now,’ writes a regular reader this year, after returning to her old Rutland haunt.

‘We collected the room key from a young lady dressed in the uniform of checked shirt and jeans. Everyone was so cheerful, I assumed something humorous had taken place.’

In a ‘quaint village’ just off the Great North Road, Anne and Richard Furbank’s 19th-century coaching inn is done up with a dash of good-humour.

‘As good as ever in all respects,’ writes a regular visitor after this year’s visit to Lawrence Hoskins’s popular hotel, a historic landmark of this Georgian town.

In the late 17th century, the Honourable Order of Little Bedlam (an aristocratic drinking club) rampaged through this sympathetically refurbished coaching inn – today an altogether more honourable crowd crosses its mellow stone threshold.

Paths through open countryside lead to the shady horse chestnut tree that guards this pretty, thatch-roofed country inn.

A series of disused outbuildings on the Marriott family’s small arable farm has been converted into homely B&B rooms.

Readers ‘had a really lovely, relaxing stay’ at Lila Arora’s apricot-washed Georgian mansion, approached by an avenue of lime trees amid sheep-grazed pastures.