Best restaurants with rooms in Dorset

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

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.

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.

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.

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.