This ‘fantastic, large family home’ was repurposed a decade ago as a B&B and popular wedding venue by its owners, the Le Grice family, who have lived here for seven generations. The splendid gardens are open for guided tours (there’s a new tea room this year), as is the house – Elizabethan with Queen Anne additions – in which there are four guest bedrooms, each named after a 19th-century literary figure (associate of the first family member to live here). Rooms vary in size: Wordsworth and Coleridge on the first floor are particularly spacious, with a rather grand wall-canopied king- or super-king-size bed and views over the garden. Coleridge also has a roll-top bath. Hazlitt and Southey, both on the ground floor with courtyard access, are simpler and, in Hazlitt’s case, smaller with no view. Two courtyard self-catering apartments have been created (breakfast available) and for glampers there’s a bell tent in the walled garden. A ‘great breakfast’ – fruit salad followed by full English, perhaps, or toast with Lizzie Le Grice’s famous medlar jelly – is eaten at a communal table. ‘No fancy touches but everything you need,’ comments more than one satisfied reviewer. (ME)