‘We collected the room key from a young lady dressed in the uniform of checked shirt and jeans. Everyone was so cheerful, I assumed something humorous had taken place.’

‘Wow, what a wonderful place this is!’ A regular reader lauded Andrew Pern’s restaurant-with-rooms on the edge of the North York Moors, which has a Michelin star and ambience on tap.

‘Our puppy absolutely loved the place!’ writes a reader, of this dining pub in a hamlet between the Brecon Beacons and the Black mountains.

At an ancient crossroads on the edge of the Fonthill Estate, Dan Brod and Charlie Luxton’s Georgian pub-with-rooms is a ‘popular, good-value’ spot.

Far-reaching views across sheep-spotted countryside spool away from this ‘splendid’ 300-year-old malthouse-turned-restaurant-with-rooms above the Evenlode valley.

‘A homely village pub within easy reach of the A1 and well worth the detour,’ writes a trusted Guide reader after a three-night stay at Paul and Lorraine Willoughby’s traditional inn.

With its rough-cut stone exterior and thatch, the Red Lion is outwardly the archetypal olde worlde pub – ‘but’, say trusted readers, ‘in our granddaughter’s terminology, the place rocks.’

The tramway that once carried Dartmoor granite from the Stover Canal is no more, but this granite inn, built in 1820 along with quarry workers’ cottages, still thrives.

Ducks glide on a brook that bisects a village green, overlooked by a Cotswold stone pub, owned by Nicola and Archie Orr-Ewing, who also manage The Swan Inn at Swinbrook (see entry).

‘A great base for exploring,’ Richard Ireton and Sarah Hudson’s ‘pleasing, white-painted coaching inn’ stands overlooking an old stone bridge across the River Monmow, while ‘behind it, green hills gently rise’.

‘We were made so welcome and were well looked after,’ writes a reader, of a stay at this pub-with-rooms at the meeting point of two old drovers’ roads.

‘We cannot praise it too highly,’ says a report this year on brothers Charles and Edmund Inkin’s dining pub with rooms.

In one of those atmospheric London entities – a street that feels like a village in the heart of the capital – this hip pub-with-rooms assumes the role of community hub, yet has ‘a great location’, within minutes of frenetic Oxford Street.

Far-reaching views across sheep-spotted countryside spool away from this ‘splendid’ 300-year-old malthouse-turned-restaurant-with-rooms above the Evenlode valley.

'A rustic gem in an unspoilt village’, this ancient coaching inn, built around a cobbled yard, is a sister to The Beckford Arms, Tisbury (see entry).

Readers this year ‘ran out of superlatives’ after a ‘rather splendid visit’ to this thatched gastropub in ‘a delightful village’.

Flanked by the 18th-century stone bridge after which it’s named, Graham and Rachel Bucknall’s ‘characterful’ restaurant-with-rooms on the water has much to like.

An air of a country gentleman’s private study filters through this rural 19th-century hunting lodge, with appealing nods to the rural pursuits that might occupy him.