Cranes, container ships, Holland-bound ferries … The views from this quayside Victorian hotel, with its striking iron-lace balcony overlooking the Stour and Orwell estuaries, are ocean-going, stirring, never dull.

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.

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

A landmark Victorian building above Fistral Bay, this hotel is a mix of the grand and contemporary, with pools and spa treatments, a golf course, surf school, bedrooms in coastal colours, refined and informal dining.

An 18th-century part-thatched former tannery turned village ale house has been renovated in a style of rustic simplicity, with unfussy bedrooms and a dining room serving pub classics and more complex dishes.

A Georgian manor house is home to a restaurant with spacious, old-fashioned bedrooms, where Frederick Forster, a former Roux Scholar, has been winning plaudits for his creative ways with locally sourced ingredients.

A Georgian manor house above Chesil Beach, this is a dog- and people-friendly hotel designed for holidays and fun, catering to everyone from tinies to grown-ups with sophisticated tastes.

The Fowey estuary washes around the rear terrace at this white stucco Victorian hotel with boutique-chic bedrooms in restful shades, and restaurant serving classic dishes with a modern twist.

The Gloriana of Robin Hutson’s Pig hotel collection (see other entries), this Grade I-listed Elizabethan beauty stands in ‘wonderful grounds in a special location’ in the peaceful Otter valley.

Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of a conflagration, Andrew Pern’s thatched village gastropub retains its joyful eccentricity, with quirky, rustic bedrooms in converted farm buildings, while Mr Pern’s modern Yorkshire cooking has lost none of its spark.

Overlooking the village duck pond, a former smithy, shop and barns come together as a hotel with popular restaurant and an indoor pool.

‘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’.

‘Gardez le Foi’ reads the Poulett family motto over the door of this thatched, ham-stone village pub, and the trio behind the Beckford group (see The Beckford Arms, Tisbury) have kept absolute faith with their winning concept here.

In a National Trust village, this is the quintessential olde English inn, timber-framed, with jettied gables, a horse passage, a tiny bar, five rustic-chic bedrooms, sitting room, garden, gastropub menu.

Everything is peachy at this apricot-hued Georgian country house in the Vale of Belvoir, at the end of a long avenue of lime trees, transformed from a family home into a delightful, idiosyncratic and much-loved hotel.

The road peters out just past this country house hotel in ‘a wonderful location’, in a historic village on the edge of Spaunton Moor, owned and run by the Wood family for almost 70 years.

A ‘stunning Jacobean building’ is, astonishingly, largely the creation of Victorian squire, parson and prolific author the Revd Sabine Baring-Gould.

Much altered since it was begun in 1695, the Cunliffe-Lister family’s neo-Gothic, castellated fantasy castle is ‘a very special place, grand and imposing’, in ‘simply glorious’ pleasure grounds and parkland.

With golf, tennis, kayaking and powerboating, indoor pool and outdoor hot tub, this spa hotel in 65 acres of garden and woodland on the Helford river is a holiday resort in its own right.

‘An enchanting destination’ is how readers describe Olga Polizzi’s Regency hunting lodge, which stands by the River Tamar in an Elysian landscape designed by Humphry Repton.

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

With possibly the best location in Portree, this former Victorian shooting lodge has spectacular views over the bay and Sound of Raasay to the Cuillin 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.

In a gem of a Cotswold town, with its green verges, galleries and tea shops, a honey-stone house is home to this first-class restaurant-with-rooms

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

La Sablonnerie is currently closed. Please contact the hotel to discuss future dates. A horse-drawn carriage conveys you over a dramatic, narrow isthmus 80 metres above the sea to this 17th-century farmhouse on a tiny island with no airstrip, no tarmac road, and no cars.

'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’.

Many regard Borrowdale as the Lake District’s most picturesque valley, and this comfortable Edwardian country house has one of its finest locations.

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.

A new era begins for this Edwardian country house above Lake Windermere, in gardens that melt into the glorious landscape.

With Thameside gardens and free mooring, this 18th-century inn has six courtyard bedrooms with vintage and contemporary furniture, a cosy beamed bar, a menu of pub favourites and creative dishes.

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