From the moment your car is valet-parked and luggage whisked to your room, you know this honeyed Cotswold manor house will deliver cosseting luxury – and star-spangled dining.

This peaceful small hotel and popular restaurant in a romantic Jacobean former dower house, surrounded by country gardens, continues to delight readers.

‘Staying here was an experience,’ wrote Guide inspectors of Nick Dent’s Georgian farmhouse hotel, which is so dog-friendly it even hosts doggie birthday parties, and where creative reuse has been raised to an art form.

On the edge of Salisbury Plain not far from Stonehenge, this thatched 19th-century beer house is run as a friendly village local and Michelin-starred pub-with-rooms by chef/proprietors Guy and Brittany Manning.

‘At the heart of a quintessentially Cotswold village’, this Georgian rectory turned laid-back but stylish hotel proved ‘enough to make a pair of Londoners consider giving up city life’.

By the footpath skirting the Avon, this popular bar/restaurant-with-rooms occupies a Grade II listed building in a ‘delightful’ town.

There is a great sense of fun at this 17th-century village pub, now run as a bar-and-restaurant-with rooms by Jackie Cosens and Adrian Jenkins – she the life and soul front-of-house, he the chef.