‘A lovely hotel with efficient, friendly staff,’ declares a trusted Guide reader this year after a third visit to the Nye family’s inn, which gazes across tidal salt marshes to Scolt Head Island and the open sea.

‘One of the most unusual hotels we've ever visited.' Guide inspectors were left reeling by art dealer Ivor Braka's pub-with-rooms in the deer park of Gunton Hall.

In ‘a beautifully rural setting’, the North Norfolk countryside stretches away on all sides from Tim and Janie Elwes’s ivy-covered Georgian inn.

Very much a ‘local’, ‘full of character and characters’, Amelia Nicholson and Marcus Seaman’s revival and expansion of a 17th-century pub on the edge of the village is well pitched.