Viewmount House

It is the attention to detail that so impresses at Beryl and James Kearney’s classical Georgian rebuild of a 17th-century house, set in themed gardens with a pond and orchard. From fresh-cut flowers to handmade Irish toiletries and manuka honey with your morning porridge, everything speaks of pride in their enterprise. It is ‘such a wonderful hotel’, writes a reader, who was welcomed by Beryl and shown to a ground-floor suite with ‘wooden floors, large rugs, period furniture (all dark wood) and antique mirrors’, a bathroom with ‘a shower as powerful as any I’ve come across’. Service bells still hang in the original vaulted kitchens, now the guest lounge. In VM restaurant, in the beamed, stone-walled old stables, tables are set with ‘starched napery, a candle and elegant china’, for a dinner cooked by Marcio Laan. Short menus include dishes such as salt-fried sirloin steak, saffron potato, shallot, porcini; monkfish, Jerusalem artichoke, kale, pickle, fish sauce. The next day, there is freshly squeezed orange juice, free-range local eggs, Irish sausages and bacon. ‘As delicious a breakfast as I could ever desire.’