The panelled walls, gilt ceilings, huge windows, decadent chandeliers and extensive art collection will leave you in no doubt about the aristocratic status of what seems like a fairytale castle.

The ancestral home of the Cunliffe-Lister family, and set in two hundred acres of parkland in the Yorkshire countryside, Swinton Park is a castle hotel complete with turrets and a tower, and with all the entertainment and grandeur of the nobility.

In every castle you would expect the bedroom to equal the fairytale proportions of the outside. So the thirty, spacious rooms at Swinton Park, with their canopied beds, regal reds, blues, creams and gold throughout and large sash windows allowing you to survey the estate certainly meet the criteria.

Swans on the mirror-like lake, deer roaming free across the grounds, and miles of uninterrupted dense green Yorkshire countryside, peppered with wild flowers, Swinton Park is Yorkshire at its most refined.

A large fireplace, high gilt ceilings, and floor to ceiling windows from which to survey the grounds make up the cavernous hall that is Swinton Park’s dining room, where chef Simon Crannage serves venison, rabbit, and game from the estate, and smoked trout from the River Ure.

Housed in the converted Georgian stables, the cookery school under the instruction of Chaine de Rotisseurs winning chef – Robert Taylor – as well as guest celebrity chefs – is a unique feature of this hotel, with an acre of garden all to itself providing classes, with fruit, vegetables and herbs grown on the estate.

Apart from being simply stately, Swinton Park is also a home and as such combines all its grandeur with a comforting familial warmth.