Lake Isle

Find peace, tranquillity and a finely cooked English beef fillet at Janine and Richard Burton’s ‘well-run’ hotel and restaurant on the High Street of this ‘lovely’ market town. (It is named after the meditative WB Yeats verse in which the Irish poet evokes a rustic serenity.) The restaurant is popular with locals, who come for chef Stuart Mead’s ‘imaginative’ modern dishes, perhaps smoked and cured mackerel, Bleue d’Artois potatoes, wasabi salt, capers; roast chicken, wild mushrooms, scorched cabbage, barley risotto. Eat well, then retire to one of the modest modern bedrooms upstairs or in courtyard cottages, to spend the night. Each is equipped with a tea tray and home-baked biscuits; the best have a whirlpool bath. There’s ‘notably good choice’ at breakfast: choose from compotes, fruits and natural yogurt; freshly baked croissants and home-made preserves; Scotch kippers; salmon and smoked haddock fishcakes. A fine base for exploring the area; for those yearning to follow in Yeats’s soil-encrusted footsteps, ancient woodland, protected wildlife sites and the Rutland Water nature reserve are within a half-hour’s drive.