A great leap of imagination carried Alice and Jade Calliva from a Croydon flat to the 18th-century coaching inn with spectacular views across the loch to Schiehallion, the local Munro.

Rachel and Graham Bucknall run a happy ship indeed at this village pub-with-rooms on the beach, with view across the Firth of Forth.

Beside a bridge over the Union Canal, Graham and Rachel Bucknall’s genial pub-with-rooms is conveniently sited for Edinburgh airport.

In a Victorian fishing lodge on the Meikleour estate, owned by the same Franco-Scottish family since 1362, this friendly country inn benefits from a verdant woodland setting and a double-bank salmon beat on the River Tay.

In a village on the Great Glen Way, hikers and cyclists stop for the simple comforts of this 160-year-old coaching inn.

Genial Scottish hospitality and a traditional pub ethos are preserved in this welcoming village inn, a log-fire-warmed, fiddle-accompanied hark back to the past.

A half-hour drive from Edinburgh, Tom and Michaela Kitchin have turned the old Golf Inn, in a village on the Firth of Forth, into a chic gastropub-with-rooms.

On a no-through road in a small village with spectacular views across the Kyles of Bute, this former shooting lodge is today a ‘thoroughly recommended’ dining pub-with-rooms-and-moorings.

‘Pub, food, rooms, log fires’: the writing’s, happily, on the white-painted wall of Debby McGregor and Brian Horsburgh’s unassuming country inn.

The scenic, single-track Bealach na Ba winds and turns across the remote Applecross peninsula before it leads to Judith Fish’s unpretentious hostelry, where low-key charm and cheer spill on to the shoreside terrace.