‘Another excellent stay,’ reports a Guide regular this year, after returning to Lawrence Hoskins’s ‘very traditional’ town-centre hotel, once a coaching inn on the old Great North Road. Her single room was upgraded at no extra cost. A friend was similarly ‘impressed’ by the ‘small but beautifully arranged garden’, and the lounges with ‘imposing fireplaces and age-crinkled wood panelling’. Over the centuries, the bedrooms, some snug, some large with half-tester bed, leather sofa and mullioned windows, have hosted royalty, nobility and gamblers, perhaps attracted by ‘the world’s finest cockpit’, built in 1725. Another visitor wrote of a room ‘straight out of Agatha Christie, with four-poster, blankets and heavy curtains but a cracking modern bathroom’. Male guests must wear a jacket to dine in the Oak Room which serves Paul Nicholls’s classic English fare including sirloin carved at a silver-domed wagon; pan-roasted venison; roasted partridge. In the informal Garden Room, dishes include a Grand Brittany seafood platter; antipasti; and a ‘very good lobster spaghetti’. Staff are ‘helpful, extremely pleasant’. Breakfast ‘has lots of choice’. (Helen Ann Davies, IB, and others)