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.

It’s one long round of fun at this family-friendly hotel, centred on a Georgian manor house overlooking Chesil Beach and the Fleet Lagoon.

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.