‘Good beer’, ‘excellent food’, ‘nice bedrooms’ and a ‘relaxing ambience’ win admirers at Richard Rose’s ‘fantastic’ 300-year-old inn in the bucolic Lyth valley. The setting is textbook countryside: next to a stone church, the building overlooks a spread of rolling green; inside, there are thick wooden beams, a slate-topped bar, a hard-working wood-burner. Each bedroom, named after a former vicar of the parish church, has an upmarket country feel in its hand-blocked wallpaper or comely floral prints; each, too, has a freestanding roll-top bath in a bathroom with underfloor heating. In the restaurant, new chef Arthur Bridgeman Quin cooks ‘imaginative’ gastropub dishes. Morning tea or coffee is brought to the room on request; a cream tea is offered every afternoon. 5 miles E of Bowness-on-Windermere.