On a historic estate once home to the O’Donels – a factious crew, by all accounts, transported here by Cromwell – Kieran Thompson’s creeper-clad Georgian house has long been a fishing destination.

‘We enjoyed a walk in the extensive grounds with the hotel’s biodiversity champion,’ write readers on a visit to this legendary Irish country house hotel that is passionate about locally sourced food.

With breakfast served until noon, afternoon tea by the drawing room fire, shooting, fishing and communal dining, a house-party atmosphere prevails at this Georgian country house.

Guests are welcomed with tea or coffee and home-baked biscuits at the Mernagh family’s farmhouse B&B beside a 15th-century fortified tower house.

Drive under a leafy canopy to this pink-washed manor house ‘in rhododendron-filled gardens rolling down to the shore of Ballinakill Bay’.

‘A long private road through woodland’ leads to Henry and Lucy Hodgson’s Victorian country house, ‘lost in time’ in 180 acres, overlooking Lough Corrib.

Simon and Christina O’Hara and rescue collie Juno delight in welcoming guests to their Georgian ancestral home, a mile off-road, on a 500-acre wooded estate with deer park.

The Leslie clan's High Victorian pile overlooking a lake is a stupendous trove of Grand Tour treasures and family lore.

In tiered gardens, an impressive panorama spreads over the city and harbour from this large, modern hotel with an artistic bent.