The anticipation builds as you follow a half-mile drive through sheep-grazed pastures to Roderick and Helena Perceval’s 18th-century classical mansion, remodelled in 1864.

This ‘epitome of Irish country house hospitality’ overlooks Galway Bay, in the dramatic Burren landscape, said to have been the inspiration for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

‘More comfortable home than guest house’, this classic Georgian house stands in deep countryside at the foot of Nephin mountain.

‘It was like going back into the past and being treated like guests in a private home’ for a reader this year after a stay at Kieran Thompson’s Georgian mansion overlooking the estuary and quay on Clew Bay.

Fifty-seven years after Myrtle Allen opened a restaurant in her home on her husband’s farm, her values are still articles of faith at this legendary country house hotel.

A house-party atmosphere prevails at Jenny and Justin Green’s Italianate mansion set amid romantic gardens and parkland.

The claim that Clan Leslie ‘can trace its ancestry back to Attila the Hun’ might give you pause, but fear not: the warmest Irish welcome awaits at this baronial-style Victorian pile on a 1,000-acre estate with three lakes and an equestrian centre.

If murder holes in a 15th-century fortified tower hint at a want of hospitality, the welcome in the adjacent stone farmhouse could not be warmer.

From the stained-glass windows and airy, white-linened bedrooms to the bone china cups at tea, there’s an old-world charm at this creeper-covered former rectory, on the outskirts of a Georgian port town on the Wild Atlantic Way.

A tree’s length from the medieval town, the Carroll family’s listed Georgian house sits within castellated walled gardens, with views of the mountains that surround.

Built for the Earls of Courtown, this Regency-style, 19th-century dower house has been run as an ‘absolutely lovely’ hotel by the Bowe family for more than 40 years.

There’s plenty of personality alongside the period furniture at this 18th-century Irish country house in parkland at the foot of the Slieve Bloom mountains: a library in the double-height stables is dedicated to the history of the evolution of civilisation, and dinner is served with a serenade from the ‘singing chef’.

A house-party atmosphere prevails at this country house in 180 acres of grounds on Lough Corrib, built in 1842 and run as a sporting lodge by owner Henry Hodgson’s great grandfather from 1890.

You get Irish country house living at its best at Simon and Christina O’Hara’s Georgian ancestral home, where fallow deer roam the 500-acre estate, with its woodland walks and a river for fishing.

The ancestral domain of the Madden family for almost three centuries, this grand Italianate mansion stands in pleasure grounds on an accredited wildlife estate.

This ‘splendid’ heritage hideaway in Ballingarry, where staff ‘fall over each other to be helpful’, is popular with Guide readers.

What appears on approach to be a white-painted bungalow with a belvedere turns out to be a Georgian country house hotel on a hillside overlooking Lahinch Bay.