Three romantic rustic hotels

Elizabethan Combe House draws together just about all the elements incurable romantics might need. A street-sized fireplace, permanently ablaze (stand well clear if having a lover's tiff), a special Chablis list (girls like Chablis), scenes-from-the Domesday Book era out of your bedroom windows and if you book the room named after a slippery local character, Tommy Wax, a bath big enough for two. Pretty aphrodisiac food, too: roast squab pigeon breast with foie gras, cumin potato and garlic foam; warm salad of tempura-fried oyster with a vierge dressing to start; roast stuffed saddle of rabbit with a herb crust, roasted jerusalem artichoke with a rabbit velouté or seared halibut with a lobster ravioli, lobster and vanilla velouté to follow. The pudding indulgence is light pistachio mousse with a dark-chocolate sorbet. Afterdinner chocolate truffles, mine long gone but not forgotten, melt on the lips.

Combe House (01404 540400), Gittisham, near Honiton, Devon, can arrange a chauffeur-driven car, from London, £100 one way, (also pickup from Honiton station). Rooms on Valentine's Day, £246, including unlimited Mercier champagne, dinner and frills such as handmade chocolates and Victorian posy in the room. Winter weekends, two-night minimum, £226 per night, including most of the above.

A framed announcement in the drawing room set the tone: "All spirits are served in large measures unless otherwise requested." It's not unusual to call a hotel homely, but at Painswick - a grand Palladian gesture in Cotswold stone - no other word more instantly applies. "Right, Nick and Ashley, when would you like to have dinner?" asked waiter Liam, bearing killer G&Ts. He'd absorbed our names by osmosis.

When owners Gareth and Helen Pugh bought Painswick in 1998, after running the Laura Ashley hotel in Llangoed, Powys, for five years they refrained from radically retooling this 1790s former rectory. Respecting the accumulations of decades - wingback chairs, Arts and Crafts wardrobes - they resolved to enhance things slowly, with country-house colour schemes and auction finds. Now, stripes, geometrics and florals advance assertively across walls and upholstery in the 19 plumply comfy bedrooms, the curious chapel-turned-bar and public spaces.

Our room featured a four-poster, sporting ruched swathes in a style you might call Henrietta the Eighth. Across the marbled hall to dinner: starters of chicken and Toulouse sausage terrine with fig and apple jam (delicious), and spiced cod fish cakes with herb dressing (needed spice). Underseasoned mains went down with Liam's well recommended white, Quincy. Next day we tackled spectacular pan-roasted field mushrooms on toast before heading home from home.

Painswick Hotel (01452 812160), Painswick, Gloucestershire. Doubles from £115 a night B&B. availability over Valentine's weekend (15-16 February). Three-course dinner £27.50.

Here's a quick way to someone's heart: book into the White Hart at Nayland, owned by Michel Roux, with a former Waterside Inn-mate installed in the kitchen, but serving meals at half the price of its three-Michelin-star sibling. Romance, as the French do it, is in the air: six rooms in the Suffolk coaching inn are named after "special laydiz" in the lives of Roux's staff, manager Franck Deletang tells me. They combine original quaintness - sloping floors and oak beams, toiletries in a blue enamel bucket - with modern simplicity, featuring butteryellow walls, checked furnishings, chrome bathroom fittings and jet showers. Thankfully, not a horse brass in sight.

Star of the show, though, is the food, naturellement. Chef Carl Shillingford creates an astonishing menu in the modest kitchen. Fresh ravioli of red mullet with shellfish-flavoured sauce Americaine (delicious), melt-inthemouth scampi with langoustine and tiger prawns with watercress mayonnaise. Mains got top marks: slow braised shank of lamb with home-made tagliatelle pasta and a foie gras sauce, vegetarian tian of winter vegetables. Be sure to order the vanilla crème brudeg;lée with lychee sorbet, and two spoons before sinking into sofas in the bar - painted a passionate red - for a nightcap.

The White Hart (01206 263 382), Nayland, Suffolk. B&B in a double, £71.50. Valentine's rate, £150, includes five-course dinner for two, champagne breakfast and half-bottle of champagne in room.