Each year The Good Pub Guide (Ebury Press, £15.99 paperback) presents awards to pubs that have reached the pinnacle of achievement and The Swan Inn, Swinbrook is included in that list. Archie and Nicola Orr-Ewing, who also run the award-winning King’s Head, Bledington, were absolutely delighted to discover that The Swan had been singled out as The Oxfordshire Dining Pub of the year 2009.

Archie considers this one of the highest accolades, as all venues that appear in the guide are there by merit.

He said: “This is not one of those guides where the licensee pays to be included. Pubs are nominated by members of the public and then inspected several times before being inserted into the guide, so even finding you have been written up is great. But to gain an award like this – well that’s really special.”

Archie and Nicola took over The Swan two years ago and have run the King’s Head for more than eight.

Although Archie had worked for two years at the North Pole gastropub in Ladbrook Grove, after leaving the army, he admits he still had a great deal to learn when he and his family moved back to Oxfordshire where he’d been born.

“Nicola and I moved in to The King’s Head when our first child, Alfie, was just six months old. Nicola gave up her flourishing hat-design business to do so. She’d never stepped behind a bar before, but we both knew if we could survive the first year, we’d be OK.”

Archie comes from a farming family and desperately wanted to find a way to return to his roots and bring his family up in the country.

“I wanted to be doing things for myself, not for others, but couldn’t go into farming, so taking over a pub seemed the obvious way to go.”

He knew one of the secrets to running a successful pub was to be hospitable to the guests, something the British are not always comfortable with. Get that right and everything else would follow.

“A lot of it depends on whether you have got the hospitality bug inside you or not. I knew I had, which meant I was halfway there.”

Archie’s philosophy proved so successful that he was called in as an advisor when the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who owns the Swan, decided to renovate the pub and give it a new look.

Then 86, the Duchess, who was born Deborah Mitford, and therefore one of the famous Mitford sisters, played a hands-on role despite her age. It was her sister, Diana, who married Oswald Mosley, while another sister, Unity, became obsessed with Hitler. Nancy, the eldest of the six sisters, wrote the popular novel Love in a Cold Climate. Photographs from the family album, which had never been seen by the public before, now adore the walls of the Swan.

After working with the Duchess for more than six months, helping her to realise her dream of breathing new life into this charming 17th-century building, it suddenly occurred to Archie that he might as well take it over completely – which is what he did. Despite having to divide his time between the two pubs – spending the morning at the Swan and his evenings at The King’s Head – Archie and Nicola have never regretted the decision, for all the extra work that this move has brought. They are a couple who thrives on such challenges.

Fortunately, Archie was able to source much of his meat, particularly the Aberdeen Angus beef, from the family farm, at Fifield. The lamb he uses in both pubs comes from Bledington. The game that features on his menus, which includes hare, pheasant, partridge and venison, is sourced locally too, and all his vegetables come from Evesham.

“Ironically, fish sells particularly well at The Swan Inn. We have decided this must be because of its proximity to the Windrush. You would think that customers would just go for a river fish such as trout, but they don’t.

They go for all kinds of fish, particularly the traditional fish and chips, served with home-cooked mushy peas. “We get our fish delivered overnight straight from Cornwall three times a week, so it couldn’t be fresher. But, of course, it is not local, it can’t be, yet the customers love it.”

Members of Camra (Campaign for Real Ale) are now paying attention to Archie and Nicola’s pubs, awarding The King’s Head the title of North Cotswolds Pub of the Year, for the four real ales always on tap and the excellent condition they keep them in.

“I change the beers in both pubs continually. The moment one barrel is finished; I get in something different, which means there is always something new for the customer to try. Most I can source locally from micro-breweries. such as the North Cotswold Brewery, Streaton-on-Floss.

Archie encouraged me to try the Pig Brook brew the day I called in at The Swan, which is one of North Cotswold Brewery’s most popular lines.

It proved a delicious light session beer, and the perfect brew to drink with lunch. Well, as he said, as I was in Swinbrook, I had to try Pig Brook. I’m glad I did.

One of Archie's most successful moves has been to acknowledge the recent financial turbulence by creating several reasonably priced meals listed on a Credit Crunch Menu.

“Customers have been amused by this and it is working very well,” he said.

When Archie and Nicola took over The King’s Head they said they wanted to create a pub that people would hope to find but seldom did. Having elevated the Swan to The Oxfordshire Dining Pub of the Year, they have already achieved their aim.