‘As good as ever in all respects,’ writes a regular visitor after this year’s visit to Lawrence Hoskins’s popular hotel, a historic landmark of this Georgian town. ‘The reception staff, without exception, were helpful and extremely pleasant.’ Past guests including Charles I and William III might have agreed that some rooms are ‘quite small’, but would surely have appreciated the evening turndown, complimentary morning newspaper, tea or coffee, bathrooms with robes, upmarket toiletries. Larger suites enjoy such features as four-poster or half-tester beds, leather sofa, mullioned windows – a legacy of Lord Burghley’s 1597 rebuild of the inn. Public rooms have wood panelling, exposed stone walls, open fires and original signs for London and York, reminders of its days as a stagecoach stop. Daniel Lambert, formerly Britain’s heaviest man, whose walking canes decorate the entrance hall, would certainly have enjoyed the food, either the Garden Room’s less formal fare, where lobster spaghetti was ‘faultless’, or the Oak Room, where chef Paul Nicholls’s dishes include the likes of roasted rack of lamb, garlic, herb crust, redcurrant, rosemary. Breakfast was ‘excellent, cooked to order, plenty of choice’. (Helen Ann Davies, IB, and others)