Very beautiful and deeply historic, Helen Heraty's unique hotel traces its history back to the Norman Conquest, when it was the house of the Treasurer of York Minster under Archbishop Thomas of Bayeux. Approached via a narrow, cobbled street, it is a synthesis of eight centuries of rebuilding and remodelling, incorporating fragments of the medieval fabric, here a 17th-century fireplace, there an 18th-century Venetian window or a19th-century stained-glass window. Spacious bedrooms are furnished with antiques. Cumberland has a bay window overlooking the hotel’s oasis garden bounded by the city wall, a freestanding bathtub and double walk-in monsoon shower. Mortimer looks onto the Minster. Willoughby has a carved William IV four-poster, Aislabie a Louis XIV inlaid bed. You can lunch in the Jacobean Long Gallery from a menu of small and large plates (seafood chowder, Welsh rarebit, chicken salad). In the Georgian Bow Room at dinner, organic and home-grown produce feature on a tasting menu and short à la carte menu in dishes such as salt-aged saddle of lamb, roasted garden onion, jus; monkfish with shellfish velouté. A more romantic wedding venue would be hard to imagine.