Old Downton Lodge

‘Pheasants scatter as you edge your way down the lanes’ to Pippa and Willem Vlok’s restaurant-with-rooms, occupying medieval and Georgian farm buildings around a flower-filled courtyard. It is a ‘super-peaceful place, renovated and furnished to a high standard’, readers write. ‘The attention to detail is faultless.’ Bedrooms, two with oak four-poster, are a study in rustic chic. A ‘high-raftered’ stables room had ‘lighting so elaborately digitised, it took most of the evening to work out which switches to activate’. A log-burner warms a sitting room in an old milking barn, where local cheeses, including Remembered Hills (‘blue, of course’) went down well with a good bottle of wine. In the ‘pseudo-baronial’ dining room, chef Nick Bennett’s short market menu might bring a choice of venison, squash and chestnut, savoy; hake, saag aloo, lemongrass and fennel; duck, chicory and orange. Most nights there is also a tasting menu. Give them notice of any dietary needs. ‘We couldn’t get enough of the food,’ another reader writes. As for the service, ‘the entire team are the most genuine, lovely, kind people’. (LH and JF, and others)