On a tranquil side street in a picture-postcard market town on the River Windrush, this higgledy-piggledy old inn pleased Guide inspectors with its ‘classic Cotswold ambience’. Part of the small Cotswold Inns and Hotels group, it occupies former weavers’ cottages, built in the 15th century, reincarnated as an inn around 1700. Log fires burn in a chain of cosy lounges with stacked bookshelves, log baskets, deep sofas and a ‘popular afternoon tea’. Rooms, some recently refurbished, are anything but standard: some have beams, one a four-poster, all come with home-baked flapjacks, a Nespresso machine, posh toiletries, a jar of Cotswold lavender. Allium has an enormous, dual-aspect bathroom with plasma-screen TV and roll-top bath; it can be twinned with dog-friendly Rosie, which has a private garden and entrance. You can eat in the bar, lounges and walled garden (perhaps venison pie, fish and chips), or the more formal restaurant, where the three-course menu includes ‘a stand-out scallop starter’; grilled Herdwick lamb rack; ‘heavenly mango sorbet’, all ‘beautifully presented’. Breakfast provides freshly squeezed juices, home-made Drambuie marmalade, ‘excellent sausages’. (MC, and others)