‘Every comfort is anticipated’ at this ‘classy, tasteful’ Elizabethan manor house, from the garden flowers in the public rooms to ‘the most extensive cheese trolley we’d ever seen’.

‘It’s up there with the top hotels we’ve stayed at,’ writes a reader this year of Sue and James Murray’s romantic rebuild of a Jacobean manor house, surrounded by parkland.

‘Everything you’d expect from a really good hotel is here,’ writes a trusted Guide correspondent in 2017, fresh from celebrating the holidays at the Francis family’s characterful hotel above Hugh Town.

‘A lovely old house’, this historic mansion on the slopes of Pydew mountain has glorious views of Snowdonia.

Deep in the Wye valley, this privately owned 17th-century manor house stands in ‘a great atmosphere of peace’, overlooking green meadows leading to the river.

Richard and Brian Prideaux-Brune, with Richard’s wife, Alison, run their Jacobean ancestral home as a characterful – some say eccentric – hotel where guests are ‘cosseted and cared for’ by ‘charming staff’.

Steeped in stories of baronets and scandalous affairs, Susannah and Stuart Macpherson’s ‘beautiful Georgian house’ is today a ‘simply lovely hotel’ standing in extensive gardens ‘magnificent with mature trees’.

At the end of a mile-long drive through ‘an estate of great tranquillity and beauty’ stands Fred and Joanna Madden’s Italianate mansion.