In Hardy’s ‘Emminster’, ten minutes from Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, a historic priest’s house is now a restaurant-led hotel.

When the Earl of Ilchester hired a certain Thomas Hardy to extend his Georgian dower house, he could not have foreseen the praise it would receive as an 'extremely well-run, very comfortable, welcoming hotel with first-class food' (Relais & Châteaux) and spa.

In the same family since it was built in the early 17th century, this manor house in Thomas Hardy's 'vale of little dairies' has a timeless appeal – but change has been afoot.

Ariane and Jamie Jones preside over a much-admired hotel and restaurant in this 300-year-old thatched cottage once home to a local shepherd (Gabriel Oak, we like to think, for this is the very heart of Thomas Hardy country).

In an idyllic village owned by the Bourke family and run in a spirit of benevolent feudalism, this former 18th-century dower house is a one-off hotel and restaurant.

Short of piping you aboard, they could scarcely be more welcoming at this luxurious, fun, dog-friendly hotel, with the sleek lines of a cruise ship, on the banks of the Stour.

The hilltop town immortalised by Ridley Scott’s classic Hovis ad is home to this well-liked restaurant-with-rooms.

Robin Hutson put the Pig in higgledy-piggledy with the most fanciful of his litter of porcine hotels (see index), set in a yellow seaside villa built in 1820 in romantic picturesque style, with gabled dormers, a turret and random roof line.

There's more than an air of Cape Cod about this white clapboard hotel above Chesil Beach, which could have come straight out of an Edward Hopper painting.

Close to Sherborne Abbey, this handsome Georgian town house in ‘lovely’ walled gardens makes a ‘pleasant retreat’ in the heart of the historic market town.

‘A very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme,’ wrote Jane Austen, and only a very strange stranger would not see the charm in Lyn and Jason Martin’s Regency-style, eco-friendly B&B.

You can sink a pint of Durdle Door in the oak-panelled bar in the village inn that furnished Thomas Hardy with his ‘Sow and Acorn’ in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, then stay the night in one of the bedrooms named on a Hardy theme.

Just up the street from the village church, this 19th-century inn is today a ‘friendly’ country pub run by chef/patron Sarah Lethbridge and her husband, Anthony.