Near the city centre but surprisingly quiet, this stylishly quirky hotel with a Michelin-starred restaurant occupies a quartet of Georgian town houses, each backed by a garden.

Despite a change of ownership, this quintessential country house hotel in a peaceful Cumbrian village is still in safe hands, report readers.

In 1952, Gerald Milsom stopped at some Tudor tea rooms beside the River Stour and liked them so much he bought them.

Jeremy and Elizabeth Hosking’s beloved and beautiful Elizabethan manor house stands in glorious gardens, amid 1,000 acres of woodland.

‘Amazingly gorgeous.

Fiona and Paul Robinson’s New England-inspired hotel, with ‘magnificent views over Gerrans Bay’, ticked all the boxes for a reader this year, from the ‘wonderful people’ to ‘food that is too good to be true’.

Satisfied diners have been coming for years to this restaurant-with-rooms in the heart of the pretty market town.

It would be easy to miss Chris and Kirsty Harrod’s Michelin-starred restaurant-with-rooms, tucked away above a single-track road in a Wye valley hamlet – but miss it and you’d miss out.

Lending its name to the hamlet that grew up around it, this former coaching inn turned restaurant-with-rooms held Scotland’s first Michelin Star in 1987.

‘A stiff walk from Portpatrick along the cliffs’ brings you to Sian and David Ibbotson’s Victorian hunting lodge overlooking the Irish Sea.

Stunning sea views accompany the food at this ‘welcoming’ restaurant-with-rooms, where the dining room overlooks the sheltered waters of Scapa Flow and the southern Orkney Islands.

With no cars, and white sandy beaches, this tiny island paradise has just one hotel.

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.

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.

As you approach this glorious Italianate Thames-side summer palace designed by Charles Barry and set in 376 acres of National Trust grounds, it ‘feels as if you are on the film set of Pride and Prejudice’, says a Guide insider (see also Chewton Glen, New Milton).

The style is 17th century and the interiors Jacobean, but Max and Susan Fischer’s manor house in ‘stunningly beautiful’ grounds on the edge of a Peak District village was built in 1907.

In an idyllic setting, overlooking the village pond, this hotel in a collection of stone buildings around a pretty courtyard maintains high standards for food, comfort and service.

The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s luxury hotel has come a long way since starting life as a 17th-century inn.

This luxurious country house hotel (Relais & Châteaux) offers ‘indulgent’ rooms, Michelin-starred dining, spacious grounds, legions of staff, and ‘comfort in all the right places’.

Far-flung Torridon hosts an extreme Scottish triathlon, but there are gentler pursuits for guests at this resort hotel, a ‘baronial pile’ on a wooded estate at the head of Loch Torridon.

Amid the wooded mountain scenery of the Cairngorms national park, a Victorian tweed mill once driven by the rocky, rushing Gynack Burn lives on as a restaurant-with-rooms.

Lower Bockhampton is in Thomas Hardy country, and what could be more Hardyesque than this ‘pretty cottage hotel’ in the former home of a local shepherd? ‘We have been there several times since Jamie and Ariane Jones bought it, and it remains a favourite,’ say recent guests.

Ferries no longer skim across Loch Glendhu to Kylestrome, but you can still watch the day’s catch being landed on the slipway, from Tanja Lister and Sonia Virechauveix’s 17th-century coaching inn turned award-winning hotel.

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.