Bittern Lodge, Tattershall

Bittern Lodge is a lakeside fishing lodge at Tattershall in the Lincolnshire fens, with a fishing peg a few steps from the patio doors and a hot tub outside. It is clean, comfortable and genuinely quiet, and one dog is welcome. Dog owners describe easy, unhurried days here: a wander round the water in the morning, fishing from the doorstep, and the hot tub once the light goes.

Where the lodge divides opinion is what happens when you want a proper walk. This is the most consistent thread in feedback from guests with dogs and it is worth being direct about. Several have found nowhere nearby to let a dog off the lead and really stretch out, and some felt the setting was less dog-friendly than they had been led to expect. The lodge sits inside a managed lakeside development rather than open countryside, so plan on driving to your walks. The fen lanes and the woodland around Woodhall Spa, roughly four miles off, are the obvious first stop.

The second thing to know is that the lodge runs to a long set of house rules, which some guests have found more prescriptive than they expected from a private holiday let. A notice on the front door states that CCTV is in use, and that has unsettled people who were not expecting it. Neither point is a reason to rule the lodge out, but both are much easier to take if you know before you arrive rather than on the doorstep.

Indoors the standard is high. Guests rate it spotlessly clean and comfortable, the hot tub gets a consistently good press, and the quiet is real rather than relative.

Best suited to an angler, or a couple with one settled dog that is content on a lead, who want a very quiet base and do not mind driving to find their walks.