Thyme

Dorothy Wadham founded an Oxford college in her late husband's name and left it the Southrop estate in her will; the college held on to it until 1926. By 2002, when Caryn and Jerry Hibbert moved into Southrop Manor, the farm buildings beside it were derelict. She restored them with her father, Michael Bertioli, a physicist and engineer, which may explain why 17th-century barns are now warmed by ground source heat pumps and wood chip boilers. The result, finished in 2020, is a hamlet of honey-coloured stone under lichen-spotted stone-slate roofs, joined by gravel paths through lavender and topiary clipped into tiers, with sheep and chickens still on the farm around it. The barn that housed the plough oxen is now the Ox Barn, beams and arches intact, and its menu waits to see what the gardener brings in.

Recommended for grown-ups who want their Cotswolds with the farm still at work, and for families willing to read the small print: twelve and over in most rooms, younger children in Old Walls or The Farmhouse, and over-16s only in the spa, which occupies Meadow Cottage and the Botanical Bothy. The cookery school runs classes of two to six hours on the estate's own produce. Otherwise there is a heated pool behind old stone walls and a tennis court for anyone who has sat still too long. For a pub there are two: the Victoria Inn at Eastleach, a walk through the valley opposite, and the hotel's own Swan in the middle of Southrop, which in 1606 was the Bakehouse, serving bread and ale to the farm workers. The bread has since given way to sausage and mash on the children's menu; the ale has stayed.