Cottage Lodge, Brockenhurst

To keep things green, we’ve left the car behind. This is no hardship if you live in the south-east: Brockenhurst is less than two hours by train from Waterloo, and Cottage Lodge is a five-minute walk from the station. Guests are welcomed in the Snug, which has an honesty bar, fresh milk in the fridge with little jugs for taking to your room, maps, guides and complimentary cake. This is the oldest part of the building, a forester’s cottage built in 1650 using the frame of a decommissioned merchant ship. The beam above our heads, Christina tells us, was the main timber supporting the deck, and the tree it came from would have been a sapling in about 1100, not long after William the Conk declared the forest a royal hunting ground. In the evening the breakfast room across the hallway morphs into the Fallen Tree (you’ve got the theme by now), a fine-dining restaurant run as a separate business by local chef Phil Holmes with a Slovakian couple, Radovan and Diana. It’s busy even on a Monday night, and we sit at one of seven lovely tables all made from (no prizes) a single tree – in this case a black poplar – for a well-prepared dinner with cheffy touches, such as a puff of smoke when I unscrew the lid on my jarred wild mushroom medley. I can never resist slow-cooked belly pork, and it’s as crisp and unctuous as any I’ve had. Our shared dessert of cherry mousse with “apricot soup” offers a great flavour hit.