If you can't get enough of the freshest of seafood at this restaurant-with-rooms, you can learn to prepare your own lobster for grilling and the perfect hollandaise sauce at Rick Stein's cookery school across the road.

‘A very nice hotel with its own private beach, secluded and quiet,’ writes a reader of this cliff-top hotel in gardens overlooking Gerrans Bay.

‘You feel as though you’re on the French Riviera’ at Olga Polizzi’s seaside hotel ‘in one of the most idyllic locations you could hope to come across’.

‘In some of the most beautiful inland scenery in Cornwall,’ Chris and Sally Searle’s B&B is ‘a time capsule of Victorian virtues, rich in associations with Thomas Hardy’.

Hidden in a back street of Padstow’s old town, these sybaritic B&B suites, created by chef Paul Ainsworth and his wife, are an ideal retreat for foodies.

Friendly, unfussy, effortlessly stylish, Charles and Edmund Inkin’s dining pub ‘retains a sense of the peacefulness, remoteness and wildness that make this part of the world so very lovely’.

With golf, tennis, kayaking and powerboating, indoor pool and outdoor hot tub, this spa hotel is a holiday resort in its own right.

Life on the water’s edge doesn’t come much closer than at this large hotel, the oldest in the maritime town.

A cream tea (jam first, the Cornish way) on the waterside terrace of this Edwardian hotel in a fishing village on the Fal estuary is a perfect way to enjoy fine weather.

‘The friendly, local staff are all smiles’ at this fun, stylish hotel occupying a baroque Victorian mansion on a hilltop above the Fowey estuary.

Where better for a sun salutation than on the cliff-top of the Lizard peninsula at this iconic white, late Victorian hotel, where yoga classes are a regular feature.

Welcome to cloud nine, an adults-only hotel floating above Carbis Bay, where you can sit over a cream tea on a decked terrace, away from the bustle of hip, arty St Ives.

Standing majestically above Fistral Beach with far-reaching Atlantic ocean views, this well-loved, family hotel is an engaging mix of the grand and the contemporary with diversions a-plenty.