AN INSPECTOR CALLS

THE ring roads around Cirencester make it a mission to reach the town centre.

If I were a trader in Market Place, I’d be miffed. It’s a pretty square, too, with the Kings Head Hotel in the thick of it.

An Elizabethan bailiff once owned the building and Charles II is thought to have stayed a night. More recently, the inn has been given a proper 21st-century makeover, with plenty of bare brick, wood beams, contemporary art and a small spa in the vaulted basement.

We’ve booked a standard double with dinner and breakfast included for £259. When we arrive, I ask if the room has a bath — and it doesn’t. But the helpful Dutch woman at reception happily bumps us up to what she calls a Feature Room.

One of its features is a little corridor up some steps that leads to the bathroom; another, the two armchairs, a third is a super-king-size bed and a fourth is the annoyingly noisy heating system.

The bar and dining area occupies the whole of the windowless ground floor and, the night we’re here, the staff are struggling to cope. No one comes near us for 15 minutes.

Eventually, I go to the bar and buy some drinks, including a bottle of Rioja, which turns out to be corked. Back I go and the barman accepts this with good grace, but the second bottle tastes just as awful.

‘ Perhaps they are not corked, but just a bad batch,’ he says generously, as he opens a cabernet sauvignon instead. Third time lucky.

Breakfast is just as slow and the wrong drinks arrive. I order the fried egg and mushroom bap, but there’s no sign of any mushrooms.

The Good Hotel Guide reports that the owners have spent ‘millions on the hotel’s transformation’. It seems to be paying off, but more needs to be done on the service front on busy weekends. Kings head hotel 24 Market Place Cirencester GL7 2Nr

01285 700900, kingshead-hotel.co.uk Doubles from £124 B&B