This peaceful small hotel and popular restaurant in a romantic Jacobean former dower house, surrounded by country gardens, continues to delight readers.

With Beckford Phoenix ale on tap, ‘top-quality’ cooking, and bedrooms with Welsh blankets and seagrass floor covering, this sophisticated pub at the edge of the Fonthill Estate in the Nadder valley is the perfect synthesis of traditional and contemporary.

On the edge of Salisbury Plain not far from Stonehenge, this thatched 19th-century beer house is run as a friendly village local and Michelin-starred pub-with-rooms by chef/proprietors Guy and Brittany Manning.

‘At the heart of a quintessentially Cotswold village’, this Georgian rectory turned laid-back but stylish hotel proved ‘enough to make a pair of Londoners consider giving up city life’.

You may feel a sense of déjà vu at Tom and Jack Nicholas’s timber-frame coaching inn: it starred as the Babberton Arms in Harry Potter films, while the picturesque streetscape has stood in for Cranford in the BBC drama.

From the moment your car is valet-parked and luggage whisked to your room, you know this honeyed Cotswold manor house will deliver cosseting luxury – and star-spangled dining (Relais & Châteaux).

Handsome and historic, this buzzy pub-with-rooms has character to spare.

By the footpath skirting the Avon, this popular bar/restaurant-with-rooms occupies a Grade II listed building in a ‘delightful’ town.

There is a great sense of fun at this 17th-century village pub, now run as a bar-and-restaurant-with rooms by Jackie Cosens and Adrian Jenkins – she the life and soul front-of-house, he the chef.