The Queensberry

Spread across four honey-stone town houses, this characterful hotel with fine-dining restaurant, themed around the pugilist 9th Marquess of Queensberry, really punches above its weight. Owners Laurence and Helen Beere have completed an extensive refurbishment programme, while a new kitchen has risen from the ashes of the old, following a fire that put the tin lid on an annus horribilis. Smart contemporary bedrooms range from small ‘club’ doubles with designer wallpaper and a shower room to a suite with a modern, seven-foot-square four-poster. The original Georgian drawing rooms are now junior suites. In the Olive Tree restaurant, Michelin-starred chef Chris Cleghorn devises innovative six- and nine-course menus (omnivore, veggie and dairy-free), with items individually priced so you can pick and mix. Maybe fallow deer, mushroom ketchup, black winter truffle; potato cooked over coal, ‘cream cheese’; Cornish turbot with Exmoor caviar. Or just have a drink in the Old Q bar (the nickname recalls another Q, the disreputable 4th Duke), where a spoof version of the Queensberry Rules forbids shouting into your cell phone: ‘I’M IN THE BAR!’