Good Hotel Guide

In ‘lovely Cotswold stone buildings around a pretty courtyard’, this mostly 16th-century former coaching inn has had a stylish make-over.

Overlooking National Trust parkland, this Georgian country house has ‘a real sense of grandeur’, say inspectors in 2018.

A ‘wonderful hot tub in the grounds’ is one of the unexpected delights of Hazel Thompson’s B&B in the Vale of Lorton, close to Loweswater, Buttermere and Crummock Water.

‘They just keep making it better every year,’ writes a trusted correspondent, of this luxurious country house hotel in Lakeland countryside.

Built by a Spanish merchant in 1750 and, as you would guess, once home to the parish priest, this smart town-centre B&B has been run for more than 20 years by ‘likeable’ hosts Philip and Noreen McEvoy.

Scottish Baronial meets Italian Renaissance in Samantha Leslie’s Victorian pile on one of the last great Irish castle estates still owned by the founding family.

A Victorian baroque showstopper, this manor house stands on a steep hill in gardens above the Fowey estuary. It is part of the Luxury Family Hotels group.

‘Intimate and eccentric’, this one-time cottage hospital on a ‘testing’ country lane has been converted into a ‘stylish’ rural guest house at the foot of Cadair Idris.

With Tal-y-llyn lake practically in the back garden, Cadair Idris behind, and ‘some of the finest walks in any national park’, Alex Yorke and Lorraine Hinkins’s Snowdonia B&B wins praise again this year.

‘The name means “leg of stone”,’ a Guide inspector tells us – a reference to the rocks on and over which this ‘fabulous, ultra-modern’ B&B is built.

‘There are chandeliers all over’ at Christa and Ian Taylor’s latest addition to the Bath hotel scene – the old Carfax, run formerly by the Salvation Army, now spiffed up to the nines, with the addition of a small spa.

From on high, Wendy and Neil Burrows’s farmhouse enjoys stunning sunsets over the Alkham Valley.

Rebuilt and reinvented by Bassam Shlewet, this small hotel brings ‘great service’, chic style and impressive cuisine to a picturesque stretch of the Thames Path.

‘A lovely, family-friendly hotel,’ was Guide inspectors’ verdict on this 16th-century stone manor house with spa in beautiful grounds, ‘looking out over rolling hills’.

In a wild coastal corner of the Highlands, this white-painted Victorian house gazes out across moorland, croft and sea.

Henry VIII gave the manor of Barnsley to each wife in turn – the old romantic! – before it passed to the Bourchier family, who built this Cotswold stone house in the 1690s.

A 17th-century mellow stone building overlooking the ‘broad way’ with its cafés, antique shops and milling tourists, is run as a well-regarded restaurant-with-rooms by Andrew and Gaynor Riley.

Guests step straight into a ‘grand entrance hall’ at this B&B in a village in the Yorkshire Dales national park.

In a small town well placed for tours of the Ring of Kerry, and the Wild Atlantic Way, Una and Dermot Brennan’s hotel is family-run, with a lot of heart and luxury boutique aspirations.

In its deepest fabric 14th-century, this former coaching inn could, by the 1860s, boast of its hot and cold baths; a more recent revamp has gone much further.

Michael Caines’s ‘beautifully restored’ Georgian manor house stands in parkland beside the luminous Exe estuary.

In sub-tropical gardens with views over Lyme Bay, the D’Allen family’s hotel occupies a grand Georgian manor house, once home to John Callcott Horsley, designer of the first Christmas card.

Through a classical arch, on a narrow central lane, this boutique city hotel has bags of character and a genial atmosphere.

A traditional hotel run with old-fashioned care between Lough Eske and the foothills of the Blue Stack mountains.