Thyme

Thyme is a village made into a hotel, or a hotel made out of a village, and the difference is the point of it. Caryn Hibbert spent years from 2002 restoring the Southrop Manor estate, a manor and its barns and cottages and the working farm around them, and turned the whole of it into a place to stay without turning it into a resort.

It runs to a hundred and fifty acres on the edge of Southrop, with a restaurant in the old barns, a cookery school, a spa set out in the meadows, and a pub that is still the village pub. The estate makes its own botanicals under the Bertioli name, grown in the gardens and pressed into scent and cloth.

What it sells, in the end, is a working English estate with the door left open, the kind of place that most of the county keeps firmly shut. It is generous with something the Cotswolds is usually careful about.

That generosity is the rare thing here, and it knows it. For every estate that opens its gate and lays a table for strangers, there are ten down the same lanes that never will, and would rather you did not ask.