Carefully restored, with an abundance of quirky details – a stream separates the dining room from bar – this well-designed roadside inn is a social media hit.

A stone’s throw from Shaftesbury’s famous Gold Hill (of Hovis ad fame), there has been an inn on this spot since the 1500s. This may well be its most successful incarnation, with ‘top-notch’ staff, ‘stunning’ rooms and a ‘first-class‘ restaurant.

The whitewashed, ivy-hung exterior of this former tannery-turned-ale house does little to betray its ‘stunning, modern’ interiors, nor the ‘warmth and charm’ that welcome visitors and locals.

Personal attention from the owners won high praise from readers this year, after a stay at this restaurant-with-rooms overlooking Blackmore Vale.

A local hot spot ‘in the middle of nowhere’, this thatch-roofed 14th-century inn is worth the trip down a winding country lane in the Nadder valley.

‘Well-regarded’ brewers Hall and Woodhouse have owned this Georgian town-centre inn since 1931. For one reader it is but ‘a useful stopping place’, for another ‘there’s no better place for a choice of Badger Ales’.

Deep in rural Wiltshire, on the edge of the Fonthill Estate and Cranborne Chase, this ‘lovely old Georgian inn’ is Dan Brod and Charlie Luxton’s sophisticated take on a country pub.