It’s an ideal time of year for snuggling up on a countryside break. We pick accommodation from shepherds’ huts in Somerset to a chateau in Wales

Six vintage-style “luxury huts” spaced out around a lake make up The Shepherds Hut Retreat in south Somerset. They have modern kitchens and bathrooms, private areas with hot tubs, and fancy features such as telescopes, gin bars, pizza ovens, fire pits and hammocks. There is also a woodland sauna on site. The newest hut, 1898, is the grandest, and is inspired by the Pig hotels. It is a mile’s walk to the Lord Poulett Arms, a thatched 17th-century pub in the village of Hinton St George, and half an hour’s drive to the beaches of the Jurassic Coast in east Devon and Dorset.
From £169, coolstays.com

A transformative conservation project encompassing East Anglia’s large but secluded Fritton Lake has high-end hospitality and nature-rich experiences at its heart

The scene is entirely black, white, grey and silver. It is cold, unusually dark and a film of ice is forming on the lake. I’m sitting in an unlit wooden sauna, alone, in immense silence. The only noise is the soft ticking of the stove as the heat rises. Across the water are ghostly silver birches and dark pines. Above them, Orion’s Belt shines bright. This vivid experience feels like midwinter in Canada, Finland or anywhere else about 60 degrees north. So it’s bizarre to know I’m a few miles south-west of Great Yarmouth.

Fritton Lake is an anomaly. Like the Broads to the north, this deceptively big, sinuous lake was largely created by medieval peat-digging, but it’s nothing like its Norfolk cousins. Set in a sandy, hilly landscape of heaths and pines, the northernmost outpost of the wildlife-rich strip of sandy heathlands running up the Suffolk coast, the lake is deep and two miles long but so hidden by trees that many people don’t know of its existence.