WE have a fabulous prize lined up for the winner of our Pub of the Year competition!

It’s a two-night break for two in Melbourne Lodge, including dinner in a prize-winning restaurant, a personal tour of one of England’s finest stately homes and a round of golf on one of the top 50 courses in the country.

The 543-acre Brocket Hall Estate is a luxurious retreat in the beautiful Hertfordshire countryside.

Built in 1760, the hall has been home to two British prime ministers and was a favourite with royalty.

The estate features two championship golf courses and the award-winning Auberge du Lac restaurant, which has an international reputation and ranks as one of the country’s most picturesque dining venues.

Melbourne Lodge, where our winners will stay, is the former stables which has been converted into 16 luxury bedrooms.

The hall is the ancestral home of Lord ‘Charlie’ Brocket, classic car-owning playboy and former I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!

contestant. He sold up in the 1990s. More recently the lease was acquired by new owners who now run it as a weddings venue, conference centre and golf course.

Brocket Hall is famed as the setting for one of the most scandalous romances in English history.

In 1812 Lady Caroline Lamb, the wife of the hall’s owner Lord Melbourne (who was later to become prime minister), began an affair with the poet Lord Byron. She is said to have bestowed on Byron his lasting epitaph when she described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.

Much of their passionate liaison was conducted in the public eye, and they flaunted their feelings for each other under her husband’s nose at Brocket Hall.

It is said that on Bryon’s birthday she held a banquet in the ballroom, where she served herself naked from a giant soup tureen!

The affair did not end well, and Lady Caroline, her body ruined by alcohol and opium abuse, died in 1827. Her ghost is said to haunt Brocket Hall to this day.

There was more scandal surrounding amorous activities at the hall two decades later.

By now it had become the home of another prime minister, Lord Palmerston, who inherited it through his wife.

He was said to have died seducing a chamber maid on the billiard table... at the age of 80!