Visiting castles, palaces and stately homes is a pleasure, but sleeping in them is a thrill. The Royal Holiday Handbook is an insiders’ guide to Britain’s most exclusive accommodation, from stately home hotels and inns on royal estates, to forest follies and cliff-top forts to rent and call your very own – if only for a week or weekend. Handpicked for combining a history of romance, scandal and intrigue with the towers, arrow-slits, Great Halls, turrets and moats of breathtaking architecture, many of the places included have remained in the same aristocratic families for centuries. Over the years they have hosted kings, queens, dukes, lairds, mistresses, knights, social climbers (and perhaps, in just one or two, the occasional ghost). Now restored, luxuriously furnished (and equipped with mod cons), the same royal hospitality is extended to lucky old you.

But a Royal Holiday goes beyond being King (or Queen) of the Castle. You’ll need stuff. With the help of the Royal Warrant Holders Association, we reveal where the Royal Family buy their gifts, jewels, kippers, gloves, cereal, champagne, shirts and handmade shoes (and why) allowing you to shop for the best of British.