They're serious about their food at this idyllic manor house hotel on the outskirts of Ambleside, with walks from the door and superb facilities for both humans and their four-legged friends.

Overlooking Scapa Flow, the Doulls’ restaurant-with-rooms has spruce modern bedrooms and a many-windowed dining room, where Paul Doull’s menus of locally farmed and fished produce vie for attention with the seascape.

Wildlife spotters are in their element at this 18th-century lodge in ‘a beautiful setting’ on the shores of Loch Sunart.

Scottish culture and celebration are at the heart of the Urquhart family’s hotel, café, bar and restaurant near the ferry terminal on Loch Broom, a social hub with simple bedrooms, young staff, short and interesting locally sourced menus, and a bunkhouse for those on a budget.

In a ‘fabulous’ position, this large hotel in lush subtropical gardens overlooks a ‘magnificent’ sandy bay. It is run by ‘extremely friendly, helpful and well organised’ staff.

'Surrounded by lovely, rolling, stone-wall country', this much-loved Peak District country-house hotel in a Grade II* listed 17th-century building ‘may not have all the luxuries of a modern boutique hotel, but the setting and grounds are stunning’.

Readers again lavish praise on this quayside hotel – ‘one of the best run and best maintained in Britain' – in a ‘stunning setting looking over salt marsh’.

With romantic Thomas Hardy associations, this Victorian rectory is run today as a B&B with traditional bedrooms, original features, lovingly tended garden, and home-grown produce at breakfast.

In gardens bordered by a stream, the Wild family’s hotel, converted from three 17th-century cottages, a stroll from its own quayside, has well-equipped, country-classic bedrooms, formal and informal dining in restaurant and brasserie.

All the bases are covered for a fun, relaxing family escape at this Jacobean manor house, which has a crèche, cinema, spa, pools, comfortable country house-style bedrooms, and formal and informal dining.

‘Our favourite hotel in the whole wide world,’ writes a devotee of this seafront grande dame, run by the same family for 104 years.

With porte cochère, crenellated tower and fine Victorian interiors, this country house overlooking Loch Portree is redolent of the history of the Macdonald family.

‘A stylish stay in the Peak District, Wildhive’s ethos is to get back to nature without foregoing creature comforts,’ our inspector writes.

Breakfast is served at a vast oak table in the Great Hall at this characterful B&B, occupying a 15th-century manor house on the Dyer family’s dairy farm.

An 'unpretentious country hotel charging reasonable prices' with 'excellent food' on the banks of the River Teign, dog-friendly Mill End sweeps into the main Guide on a wave of approval.

‘This buzzy pub is very much ye olde village inn, with rustic furniture and roaring fires under the beams,’ writes a Guide insider, though the food is ‘so much better than your standard pub fare’.

Ducks glide on a pond and guests take tea in front of this beautifully proportioned Queen Anne-style mansion in a hamlet between the Cotswolds and the Mendip hills.

Hipping Hall will be closing permanently on the 24th July 2023. Between the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District – and just ten minutes from the M6 – Hipping Hall is a surprising foodie find with understated yet luxurious bedrooms, spacious gardens and a relaxed atmosphere.

Avowedly family-friendly and fun yet stylish, this hotel with spa occupies a Baroque Victorian mansion in five acres above the Fowey estuary.

Deep in the Sussex countryside, a romantic Elizabethan manor house, built by an ironmaster for his bride, stands amid 1,000 acres of historically important gardens, pleasure grounds and woodland.

New owners have lavished millions on this Georgian hotel in a New Forest yachting town on the edge of the Solent.

Huddled below wooded hills, beside a stone bridge over the River Monnow, this whitewashed former 17th-century coaching inn is delightfully at ease in the landscape.

Guide readers are unswervingly loyal to this family-friendly country house by the sea, with peerless views to Snowdonia across Cardigan Bay, run by the Fletcher-Brewer family since opening in 1948.

Readers on their third visit to this ‘stunning Georgian building with wonderful grounds’, concluded that everything 'continues to be excellent'.

Behind its powder-blue façade, Helen and Chris Sheldon’s Georgian town house is a ‘well set-up, furnished and immaculate B&B’ with a terrace overlooking Cardigan Bay.

A Victorian mock-Tudor fishing lodge in wooded grounds on the River Irfon is today a spa hotel and foodie destination with a country house ambience and views to the Cambrian mountains.

'Absolutely faultless from the moment we arrived', Malcolm and Patricia Lewis's manor-house hotel (Relais & Châteaux) sits in landscaped gardens with a lake and specimen trees.

With inglenook, antiques, beams and brasses, charming, cottage-style bedrooms and an enclosed rear garden, this 16th-century honeyed-stone guest house sits pretty on the high street of a picture-postcard Cotswold town.

To find a gem in a quiet corner of the visitor-thronged Lake District is not easy, but this smart village inn in the lovely Lyth valley is, as one reader reports, ‘always a favourite’.

A tree-lined drive leads to this 17th-century Wye Valley mansion, remodelled in 1912, replete with country-house comforts, important artworks, and a well-regarded fine-dining restaurant.

Bedrooms are spread between properties in Clough Williams-Ellis’s extraordinary Italianate resort village, but this hotel centres on a Victorian mansion with Art Deco bar and fine-dining restaurant.

‘There is so much to love about this wonderful and unique place,’ wrote our inspector on a stay at this landmark cobalt blue former harbourmaster’s house on the harbour of a planned Georgian town.

This remote restaurant-with-rooms is unexpectedly stylish, with the odd wacky touch, such options as a ferry cabin and yurts in the grounds, and sophisticated modern Scottish cooking.

The ferry from Oban brings you to the sole hotel, now under new ownership and management, on a beautiful island of fine sandy beaches, heather-clad hills, wild goats, ancient woodland, peat bogs and tidal flats.

Decorated in cool Scandi-Scots style, this former crofter’s house on the shores of Loch Dunvegan is a celebrated restaurant showcasing local produce, with, across the courtyard, spacious, split-level bedrooms painted in restful shades.

Close to Loch Shiel, this old coaching inn has hosted travellers along the Road to the Isles since the 17th century.

Perfectly placed to enjoy a distillery tour or to follow the whisky trail, Sonia Marshall’s Victorian house in the heart of Speyside stands in mature grounds on the edge of a swathe of the ancient Scots pine woodland that surrounds Grantown.

Overlooking the sea towards Mull, in a 'fabulous location near the harbour', this hotel on the Hebridean island of Iona has a deserved reputation for its warm welcome, fresh and creative food, and restorative peace.

Take afternoon tea on the terrace at this former Victorian tweed mill and you hear nothing but birdsong and the plash of the Gynack Burn that once powered the looms.

In the vast, remote, elemental landscape of Assynt, a 19th-century coaching inn overlooking Loch Glendhu has moved with the times to become a relaxed modern hotel.