An easy-going atmosphere and oodles of character filter through Charles Lowther’s dramatic ancestral home. As one Guide reader contentedly observed, the discreet staff and ‘shabby-chic style’ contribute to its feeling ‘more like staying at a grand house than a hotel’. There is an honesty bar by the log fire, stacks of modern art and old photographs. The ‘comfortable, classy’ bedrooms have an eclectic country house style: a four-poster bed, an antique bath, a separate WC in an old ‘priest hole’ carved into the wall, views across the 17th-century topiary garden. In the conservatory dining room, ‘the food is excellent, the staff friendly and attentive’. Richard Swales, ‘a real wizard’, serves ‘delightfully balanced and creative’ combinations of unusual, locally procured produce: perhaps home-reared chicken, cauliflower cheese, truffle; followed by geranium set cream, Yorkshire rhubarb, blood orange and Campari granita. Don’t miss the quintessentially English terraces, woodland walks or kitchen garden next to fields of goats, ducks and rare-breed pigs. ‘A wonderful experience,’ writes a reader in 2018. ‘Heartily recommended.’ (K and JP)