Richard and Brian Prideaux-Brune, with Richard’s wife, Alison, run their Jacobean ancestral home as a characterful – some say eccentric – hotel where guests are ‘cosseted and cared for’ by ‘charming staff’.

‘High standards are upheld’ at Ariane and Jamie Jones’s ‘lovely’ restaurant-with-rooms deep in Thomas Hardy country, say returning guests in 2017.

Just the ticket for ‘young children and their exhausted parents’, this Georgian manor house stands in ‘beautiful, romantic’ countryside. It has a ‘friendly, relaxed’ atmosphere that’s ‘really geared for kids’.

‘Stylish and modern’, Robert Wilson and Tim Lloyd’s ‘welcoming’ hotel gleams on the banks of the River Stour, shipshape inside and out.

The fourth of Robin Hutson’s informal, coolly rustic hotels, this little Pig went to the beach, settling in a ‘wonderful location’ – a rambling manor house in gardens facing Studland Bay.

Mary-Lou Sturridge and Tony Mackintosh (late of London’s Groucho Club) have turned a once-derelict B&B into a ‘laid-back but sophisticated’ restaurant-with-rooms within sound of the waves.

The interior of this refurbished Regency house has much that is eye-catching, but the views out the sash windows are more than a match – the best bedrooms look along the coast.

‘The welcome is always friendly’ at this ‘likeable’ country hotel in a former priests’ house dating back to the 13th century.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles skirted this stone-built 16th-century inn, named the Sow and Acorn in Thomas Hardy’s novel, but locals and visitors today know better.

Imaginative pub food and wood-fired summertime pizzas combine with upmarket country comforts at this quirkily renovated roadside inn.