An ancient, honey-stone priest’s house turned hotel in a pretty market town has been given a chic make-over as a restaurant-with-rooms.

Standing amid flower-filled gardens, with the Devilish stream skipping through, this dog-friendly, child-friendly Jacobean manor house is traditional with a capital T.

Lower Bockhampton is in Thomas Hardy country, and what could be more Hardyesque than this ‘pretty cottage hotel’ in the former home of a local shepherd? ‘We have been there several times since Jamie and Ariane Jones bought it, and it remains a favourite,’ say recent guests.

Change is afoot at this former dower house, which opened as a hotel in 1996 under Barbara Garnsworthy, in an estate village of thatched limestone cottages amid the rolling chalk downs of Cranborne Chase.

With the shiny promise of a cruise ship, Robert Wilson and Tim Lloyd’s spa hotel by the River Stour is as family- and dog-friendly as you please.

A literary past accompanies this former 16th-century coaching inn, which features as the Sow and Acorn in the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles and in two of Thomas Hardy’s short stories.

A higgledy-piggledy 19th-century marine villa with a jumble of towers and gables gazes across Studland Bay to the chalk stacks of Old Harry Rocks.

Order a crab sandwich on the terrace, gaze out over Lyme Bay from this white-painted hotel above Chesil Beach, and you can half imagine you’re in Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod.

‘Top class in all respects’, Lyn and Jason Martin’s Grade II listed Regency B&B overlooking the Jurassic coast is pleasing inside and out.

The village stream runs between the dog-friendly bar and the bookshelf-lined restaurant of this stylishly updated roadside inn, in a peaceful rural setting between Shaftesbury and Blandford Forum.