Property Market returns to Kent, where Alastair Hancock of Jackson-Stops in Cranbrook is handling the sale of The Paper Mill near Benenden, one of hundreds of Wealden hall houses built by prosperous yeoman farmers on the back of the wool trade between about 1450 and 1530.

Originally built in about 1500, the lovingly restored, Grade II*-listed house is surrounded by its 51 acres of farmland and ancient woodland that have changed little over the years. According to research provided by the owners, the original house consisted of seven rooms and was extended over the years before being divided into two cottages.

Although little is known of the early occupants of the house, there is thought to have been a mill there in the 14th century and, in about 1755, one William Blackwell and his family started making paper in a mill in a riverside field near the house.

At that time, the house, known as Hinksden Mill, was shared with the Croft family, who owned Mill Farm next door. The Blackwells and Crofts lived there until 1908, when the Blackwells left, having ceased to make paper in 1854. In 1909, Gunther of Tongswood, Hawkhurst (now Saint Ronan’s School), bought the farm from Lord Rothermere, the owner of the surrounding Hemsted estate (now Benenden School), and the Crofts also departed.

The new owner undertook a major restoration of the hall, which he used for shooting parties, having turned the west end into a home for his gamekeeper and added the kitchen extension. The mill itself is believed to have been destroyed by fire at the end of the 20th century.

Mr Hancock quotes a guide price of £4m for The Paper Mill estate, which has been owned by the same family for the past 50 years and comprises the 3,910sq ft main house, which provides accommodation on three floors, including the magnificent Great Hall with its full-height ceilings, brick flooring and majestic fireplace, and the enclosed minstrels gallery, which now forms the first-floor landing.

Also located on the ground floor are the kitchen/breakfast room, dining hall, music room, drawing room and home office; the first floor houses four bedrooms and two family bathrooms, with a further double bedroom and storage on the second floor.

Included in Lot 1 are a four-bedroom converted oast house, a one-bedroom converted stable used as a holiday let and a Kentish barn currently employed for weddings, with potential to convert subject to the necessary planning consents, plus various additional outbuildings.

Lot 2, available for an additional £800,000, is the recently extended and modernised Paper Mill Cottage, which has direct access from Hinksden Lane. It offers 1,938sq ft of accommodation, including two reception rooms, a large kitchen/breakfast room, conservatory, three bedrooms and a family bathroom, with generous gardens to front and rear and views over the surrounding farmland.

The Old Paper Mill estate is for sale with Jackson Stops for £4 million. For more information and pictures, click here

In any country estate, owners ought to be able to find refuge from the busy world. That is the least of what one would expect from outlaying such sums of money to buy them. But that refuge comes in different shapes and sizes. Perhaps you would like your own private peninsula in Dorset? Or maybe something else.

Strutt & Parker are marketing a small country estate of a different nature. Ayot Bury in the Hertfordshire village of Ayot St Peter is a Grade II-listed Georgian manor house overlooking mature parkland and set in just over 40 acres.

The asking price of £10.75m reflects the best-of-both-worlds location; it’s on the edge of what some believe to be one of Hertfordshire’s prettiest rural villages and yet within easy distance of Welwyn Garden City, where trains take only 29 minutes to reach King’s Cross. The handsome, nine-bedroom family home has elegant and spacious reception rooms, including a spectacular 42ft-long ballroom with a beautifully carved marble fireplace.

‘Equally majestic,’ notes Mark Rimell, who is leading the sale, ‘is the drawing room, with hand-painted silk panels, a hardwood floor and fine views through the mullioned windows to the parkland beyond.’

The owners have carefully restored the house over recent years, with significant attention to detail, and there are new heating and electrical systems throughout. Five good-sized bedrooms with bathrooms are on the first floor, with three additional bedrooms and a ‘treatment room’ on the second floor. Accessed both through the house and independently is a cottage, which is ideal for relatives or staff.

Outside, the charms of Ayot Bury are extensive. There is an excellent range of well-kept outbuildings providing stabling, garages, storage and two offices, one used as a home office and the other a secondary workspace with its own kitchen and shower room. Great care has been invested in the gardens, which are mainly laid to lawn and studded with a selection of mature specimen trees and deep banks of rhododendrons.

A York-stone terrace overlooks a peaceful sunken garden and, to the north, set away from the main house, tall hedges shield a floodlit all-weather manège and, separately, the tennis court and its pavilion.

Ayot Bury is for sale with Strutt & Parker for £10.75 million. For more information and pictures, click here.

In the market for estates, expectations come in many shapes and sizes. International buyers typically want an ‘English country estate’, but with no more than 20 acres, says Charlie Wells of buying agency Prime Purchase.

‘For some, it’s a residential estate with 30 acres, beautiful grounds and a big pair of gates. For others, it should have 3,000 acres, with farmland, forestry and valleys designed for sport — as well as running tracks, stick-and-ball grounds for polo or a canter track — depending on interests.’ Demand will always be there as land, with or without perceived tax breaks, is a very desirable commodity, he adds.

Although the residential element of Bestwall Park, which is launched to the market today in Country Life, meets the expectations of a traditional estate, the rest is somewhat different. The six-bedroom Arts-and-Crafts house in coastal Dorset sits in 160 acres on an almost entirely private peninsula bounded by the Rivers Frome and Piddle and with direct access to Poole Harbour. Despite the privacy it affords, Bestwall is only a mile from the centre of the market town of Wareham.

For many years, the house was thought to have been the work of C. F. A. Voysey, but it’s more likely to have been designed by one of his students. Built in 1911, it offers well-proportioned rooms with many attractive features, including parquet flooring, original door furniture and decorative woodwork.

It was purchased by the owners in 2001 and has been the subject of an extensive programme of restoration, including a particularly attractive kitchen/family room, which was formerly four separate rooms.

At the same time, the owners opened up the fireplaces and had fire surrounds made of local Purbeck stone, quarried by the grandson of the first stonemason to work on the original construction of the house.

For 40 years, Bestwall Park formed part of the land bank for a quarry site. Since 2001, the current owners have, through considerable effort, restored and maintained the property, returning it to its natural beauty. The water meadows have been used for duck flighting when in season and ‘some incredibly sporting birds have been on offer,’ notes selling agent Geoffrey Jones of Savills, who is asking £4.25 million. The fishing comprises about one mile of single bank and, although the main species is trout, salmon are often seen.

Immediately to the south of the lawned area of the garden is an unfenced hay field leading to the seven-acre lake, which was designed based on advice from the Wetlands Advisory Service at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire. It provides a stopover for migratory birds that join the resident rare wading species and waterfowl. It also has a zip wire and has been a ‘Swallows and Amazons-style playground’ for the owners’ children, who have messed about in boats and kayaks.

On the western side of the estate lie 17 acres of permanent pasture, part of which has been drained and levelled for use as a polo field. To the north, bordered by the River Piddle, are the ancient water meadows registered as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

In addition, there’s rich archaeological history on the Bestwall peninsular. A dig from 1991 to 2004 produced Neolithic and Mesolithic remains, a Bronze Age trove and significant Roman and Civil War artefacts.

‘Bestwall isn’t a traditional country estate per se, but there’s a huge number of interesting elements, which opens it up to a variety of buyers who are searching for peace and privacy,’ says Mr Jones. ‘In addition, thanks to the increased focus on water quality and Nature recovery, it presents an interesting proposition to the market.’

Bestwall House is for sale with Savills for £4.25 million. For more information and pictures, click here.

Some 54 acres of gardens, grounds, woodland and paddocks surround Whixley Hall, in the village of Whixley, seven miles from Boroughbridge and 10 miles from York; a further 41 acres of parkland is available separately.

Grade II listed, on account of its impressive facade, one chapter of its history saw it bequeathed as ‘an almshouse for 12 elderly gentlemen’.

And though the redbrick building dates back to the mid-to-late 17th century — an engraving in the hallway reads 'Christopher Tancred's seat 1698' — the stone slate roof only dates back to the 20th one.

Nowadays, it’s ‘a large house, but not too large, with a room for every occasion and six good-sized bedrooms served by five bathrooms and a self-contained one-bedroomed apartment,’ say agents.

Two large attic rooms could become bedrooms, too, and further accommodation comprises the three-bedroom The Dower House, under a pantile roof, and two-bedroom Way Cottage which has its own small garden.

Modern additions include a bio mass boiler and craftsman-made secondary glazing which have greatly enhanced the property's energy efficiency.

The formal gardens are well maintained, with neat lawns, clipped box, specimen trees, parterre, kitchen garden and sizeable vegetable garden behind the stables. High brick walls means ensure that the space is wonderfully private.

Beyond the gardens, to the north and west, there are a number of grassy paddocks and woodland shelter belts that stretch to about 55 acres. There are a further 41 acres of parkland to the south of a minor road, available by separate negotiation.

For sale via Savills — click here to see more details and pictures.

Scottish Borders — £15 million

The Portmore Estate — all 3,459 acres of it — is on the market, and it's quite an amazing opportunity to buy a huge chunk of Scotland. There's farmland, hill grazing, stalking, forestry, a reservoir with fishing chalet and seven estate houses — plus, of course, the magnificent A-listed castle at the heart of it all.

All this plus a location in a charming village (with a decent pub) close to the lovely Borders town of Peebles.

For sale via Galbraith — see more details and pictures.

East Lothian — £4.2 million

Ormiston Castle is a classic Scots Baronial property dating to 1851 — with all the romatic and whimsical architecture you'd expect of the era, combined with the solidity of the Victorian builders. High ceilings, huge windows and a flowing floorplan, a recent refurbishment, 15 acres of grounds and an easy trip to either Edinburgh or Glasgow.

For sale via Alexander Millett International — see more details and pictures.

Stirlingshire — £1.95 million

A whopping 17,000sq ft of property within 11 acres of the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park; it's been for sale with a different agent, but has now been relaunched with a lower price.

Invertrossachs Country House has been run as a holiday let, but could be turned to almost any purpose, subject to the relevant permissions.

On top of all that it's under 40 miles from Glasgow, and just over 50 miles from Edinburgh, making it wonderfully easily accessible.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Edinburgh — £1.8 million

Does this count as a castle? We think so, even though it's 'only' the tower for sale at the rather majestic New Craig, within the Craighouse Estate in Edinburgh.

There's epic grandeur in the architecture, huge rooms, expansive views and a roof terrace with battlements. What a place.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures.

Angus – £1.7 million

A gorgeously pretty country house in a big-but-not-too-big estate of just under 70 acres, There's a trio of cottages as well as Keithock House, the mansion at the heart of it all, which has utterly charming architecture inside and out.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Berwickshire — £3.25 million

The finest Scots baronial castle in Scotland? That's the reputation held by Ayton Castle, and it's not hard to agree. James Gillespie Graham's magnificent red sandstone monolith absolutely has to be seen — as do its Mediterranean-inspired gardens.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures.

Dumfries & Galloway — £4.5 million

With almost 800 acres of land, a six-figure timber income, hydro-electric scheme, grazing for Highland cows and sporting opportunities, the Glenquicken Estate is a classic Scottish property.

The bad news? There's no castle. The good news is that there is a 19th-century Swedish-style timber farmhouse included, and it's absolutely beautiful.

The even better news — for those keen on the farmhouse but not quite so up for managing a large, busy estate — is that the house is available as a separate lot for £850,000, which includes 176 acres and three lochs.

For sale with Galbraith. See more pictures and details for this property.

Edinburgh — £15 million

13 bedrooms, stable block with nine stalls and a bell tower in this Georgian fantasy house just outside Scotland's beautiful capital city.

There is a remarkable Robert Adam mansion at the heart of the property, but with 764 acres and far too much to list here, the house is only the start. Incredible.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Clackmannanshire — £2.25 million

Technically a coachman's house rather than a castle (if this is his house, we'd love to see the coach he drove), this enormously spacious home of nearly 7,000sq ft is near Dollar, making it a fairly easy drive to Stirling, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews.

Dating to the 1880s, it's been completely refitted in quite some style — think home gym, tennis court and Sonos sound system throughout. It's like Footballer's Wives with added turrets.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Fife — £1.9 million

The cutest and the most prettily-named castle on this list by quite some way, Pirwindy Keep is in the Fife countryside between Upper Largo and St Andrews.

It's a real mix of styles: a stone-heavy country kitchen with giant Aga sits alongside Japanese-style bedroom and a bathroom which would shame most five-star hotels.

For sale with Rettie. See more pictures and details for this property.

Kingussie, Highlands — £12,000,000

The Balavil Estate is almost 7,000 acres of the Highlands, centred on this classic country seat within the Cairngorms National Park.

While its wild and remote enough to fulfil anybody's fantasies, it's also surprisingly accessible: the main A9 is close by, giving excellent links to Inverness with its rail service and airport.

For sale with Landfor. See more pictures and details for this property.

Tranent, East Lothian — Offers over £1,300,000

Battlements, spiral staircases, stags' heads on the walls and a barrel-vaulted kitchen in the basement: while some castles are disguised stately homes, Fa’side Castle is the real deal.

Built in the 14th century, it offers fantastic views across East Lothian up to nearby Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth.

There are six bedrooms, a couple of acres of grounds and a 300-year-old barn that's been converted in to a pair of cottages.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures of this property.

Creetown, Dumfries & Galloway — £9,500,000

Far from your usual castle-buying opportunity, Castle Cary isn't just a ruined castle by the sea — although it is also that — since it comes with an entire holiday park as part of the deal.

The place has been in the same family for 166 years but now the whole thing is ip for sale, including the holiday park (opened in 1976) complete with its swimming pool, pub, nine-hole golf course and over 100 tent/caravan pitches, all set in 220 acres.

There is a fine six-bedroom main house, while the castle itself is a romantic ruin, dating back to the 15th century.

For sale with Galbraith. See more pictures of this property.

Sometimes a property is so chocolate-box perfect if's hard to believe — and in the case of this house, even the name is like something from a story book: Cubby Close Cottage, which is up for sale.

The house is a delightful three-bedroom, thatched home set in as pretty a slice of countryside as you'll find in the West Country, at the heart of the National Trust's 6,000-acre Killerton Estate.

Inside, the house has been recently refurbished, but it's kept many charming period features — not least a glorious country kitchen with a huge traditional Aga set in an alcove created from ancient gnarled beams that date to the cottage's 18th century origins.

The thatched roof, you'll be glad to know, was re-done in 2017, so you'll not need to worry about anything more than standard maintenance for some time to come.

It's not a huge place. There's a living room and the kitchen/breakfast room, plus a utility room, bathroom and conservatory downstairs.

Upstairs are three modestly-size bedrooms, and another bathroom.

The gardens are three-quarters of an acre, but you're entirely surrounded by fields and woodland, with the River Culm close by. And yet despite this bucolic, secluded feel, Exeter is just eight miles away — it's a thatched country dream that's eminently commutable.

The agents, Bradleys, have it listed at £650,000, which — given its status as part of the wider estate — you might have guessed buys you not the freehold, but a 90-year lease.

Still, the ground rent is set at £10 a year, so no outrageous service charges here, and we're fairly sure you can trust the National Trust not to pop a couple of extra zeroes on the end of that figure any time soon.

Cubby Close Cottage is for sale at £650,000 — see more details and pictures.

Credit: Paul Massey

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Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Buckinghamshire — £2,150,000

If you ever wondered why they made mock-Tudor home by the score in the 1930s, it's places like this that were the inspiration. You can see where those 1930s suburb planners were coming from.

This four-century-old, Grade II listed house in a viillage near Aylesbury has more than just its beautiful timbered charm, though: there are five bedrooms, five reception rooms and five acres — including a driveway that weaves along an avenue of hornbeams.

For sale with Michael Graham. See more pictures and details for this property.

Hampshire — £7,950,000

Quite possibly as good as it gets in the New Forest? This 12-bedroom house has an utterly gorgeous setting in 65 acres of land near Lyndhurst.

There are things you'd expect at this price — swimming pool, staff quarters and so on — plus a long list of things you wouldn't, from the log cabin in the grounds to the five greenhouses.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Cambridgeshire — £3,900,000

Considering you can pay well over £2m for a semi-detached house of 2,000sq ft in Cambridge, this utterly wonderful home not far away in Ickleton feels like an absolute bargain.

It's a 13,000sq ft with a list of rooms that would put the Cluedo board to shame, from wine cellar and billiard toom to the conservatory and the snug. There's also a manege and stables, an orchard and the large pond at the end of the lawn.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Devon — £4,000,000

Utter fairytale vibes at this cottage just outside Chagford, on the northern edge of Dartmoor.

This is not just a house, but rather a mini-estate taking in 30 acres and a couple of holiday cottages — yet it just a few minutes off the A30, making it a simple commute to Exeter and beyond.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Stirlingshire — £6,500,000

The Cromlix Estate has come on to the market, a 1,346-acre holding with a series of houses, lochs, fishing and forestry all centred around the town of Dunblane.

The sellers are happy to break the estate up in to lots, which might be of interest to a certain retired tennis player: Sir Andy Murray owns the Cromlix Hotel, which is separate from the estate but right on the doorstep.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

A spectacular 886-acre estate that puts rewilding at its heart is up for sale to the northeast of the Cairngorms National Park.

Beldorney Estate includes the striking 16th century Beldorney Castle, built by the Gordon family, one of the most influential clans in the region at the time. It is one of the earliest Z plan castles in the north east of Scotland and is bound to catch the eye of architecture buffs.

The Aberdeenshire estate is on the market for £5,000,000 via Strutt & Parker.

Beldorney Castle has been developed over the years, including the addition of two wings in 1679 and remodelling in 1713, when coved ceilings and bolection-moulded chimney pieces were introduced. It has also (thankfully) been restored and upgraded in more recent years too.

Still, it’s not lost its historic charm and there are ‘fragmentary remains’ of original wall and ceiling paintings, according to Strutt & Parker.

The castle boasts enormous and atmospheric reception rooms. The Grand Hall is quite a spectacle with pitch pine panelling, as is the Upper Hall, with a beamed, vaulted ceiling. In fact, there are quite a few vaulted rooms around here.

But there’s a (slightly) more low-key side to the castle too: a kitchen, dining room, two drawing rooms, cloak room, utility room and dressing room. Bold-painted walls are the order of the day in many of these rooms.

The castle has five bedrooms, with a further two in a self-contained apartment in the south wing.

Like most estates of this scale and stature, Beldorney Estate comes with an assortment of other buildings: two stone cottages, a farmhouse, and several outbuildings.

But what of the land itself? Well, it’s dominated by grassland. But there’s also woodland, wetland, and heathland and scrub.

Robert McCulloch, Head of Strutt & Parker’s Estates & Farm Agency Department in Scotland, says: ‘The chance to own a Scottish castle will carry an undeniable allure with buyers, offering a blend of history, prestige, and architectural beauty.

‘However, its diverse landscape and location on the River Deveron provide much more than just scenic value – they present a meaningful opportunity to contribute to nature recovery and support community development.’

If you're a serious buyer, it’s worth noting that Highlands Rewilding, the owner of Beldorney Estate, is on the lookout for a buyer or an investor who shares its vision.

McCulloch explains: ‘Although the sale is open to a broad range of potential buyers, preference will be given to those who align with Highlands Rewilding’s vision for the estate's future and are willing to enter into a long-term management agreement to allow Highlands Rewilding to continue to manage the land. It is a rare chance to invest in a property with both historical and ecological significance.’

Beldorney Estate is on the market for £5,000,000 via Strutt & Parker — see more details and pictures.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

3,000 pristine acres of Loch Lomond National Park, where red squirrels roam spectacular woodland, have come up for sale

Somerset — £1,700,000

The glass-walled room. The roses growing across the front door. The chic, clean design and decoration inside.

Yes, this really is it: a country cottage that still, somehow oozes cool. Even the location backs that up: The Newt and the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Bruton are both nearby.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Dorset — £5,500,000

The home of Kirstie Allsop's late parents — a place they transformed magnificently in almost every aspect — has been on the market for a little while, with the price now reduced to £5.5m.

It represents the vision of its owners translated into a modern Georgian masterpiece by local builder Martin Fulford. ‘A few walls and one window’ are reputedly all that remains of the original farmhouse.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Kent — £10,000,000

With trains to London Bridge in just over half an hour, Tonbridge is a popular commuter haven — and that makes this 24-acre mini-estate incredibly desirable, especially given that permission is in place to create a modern Palladian mansion (the main picture here is an artist's impression).

Your £10m, buys more than a building plot, though: Elizabeth House, the so-called 'Secondary' home of 3,650 sq ft and four floors, is recently completed and ready for new owners to move in.

For sale with Strutt & Parker. See more pictures and details for this property.

Surrey — £2,750,000

Kitchens sell houses, so they say. If that's really true, you'll need to act quickly to snap up this one: a six-bed wonder on the western fringes of London.

Not that it's just the kitchen that's a draw: the garden is glorious, the rooms have perfect proportions and there's even a cupola skylight above the sweeping staircase.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Somerset — £2,750,000

A manor house near Bath that's so unapologetically traditional you'd expect Mr Darcy to wander out of the front door at any moment to glare at people.

Seven bedrooms make this a great home for big families — and a separate three-bedroom coachouse means that it could be a multi-generational home with ease.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Devon — £2,750,000

A third house in a row at £2,750,000 seems a bit much, but we couldn't leave this gem out: a wisteria-clad marvel near Axminster.

As idyllic as the house is — and it really is — we'd almost still insist that the gorgeous 29 acres of grounds are really the selling point: this is secluded living in fine style, with gardens, woodland, 1,000 yards of river front and a separate cottage. Bliss.

For sale with Strutt & Parker. See more pictures and details for this property.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

The Dorset home of Kirstie Allsopp's parents has come up for sale at £6.5 million

TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp remembers the moment her parents first caught sight of Lyddon House in the pages of Country

Nothing lasts forever, but in an age of commercial possibilities, the disposal of country-house estates can be unsettling for many and a golden opportunity for a monied few. The sales of Ripley Castle near Harrogate, to be revealed in more detail by Carter Jonas after October this year, and the Bridehead estate in Dorset, which went on the market in early summer, are sensational — Ripley especially for the sudden culmination of seven centuries of family ownership, which started with Sir Thomas Ingleby in the 1300s and will end with Sir Thomas Ingilby, 6th Baronet, in 2024.

Both properties are asset rich. Bridehead is a traditional country domain with the estate hamlet of Littlebredy, farms and a neat Gothick mansion at its core. Ripley has its splendid Grade I-listed castle, 18th-century pleasure grounds, deer park and the Boar’s Head pub, likely to be included in the sale. Community crowdfunding efforts are underway to buy separately the eye-catchingly ornate village hall, built in 1854.

No doubt decisions such as these to sell ancient estates have not been taken lightly, but the end of any long association between a big house and its family and tenants might cause a psychological wrench, as much as a practical need for some to find another home or job. With a new owner — usually private buyers or international investors — come changes to estate management, residential lettings and the visiting public. Collections might be dispersed; the motifs of nobility carved in stone become outmoded.

'There are definite upsides for buyers who could inject a vital boost and a fresh perspective'

The vulnerabilities of country-house estates haven’t altogether gone away. Although a great many are flourishing, modern-day sales faintly recall the worst of the mid-20th-century spoils precipitated by two World Wars, when countless houses were crushed and land sawn up for the want of an heir and a fortune.

Times have changed, but current economic conditions are not helping: the post-covid outlook is one of sharply risen costs of materials and labour and ‘new legislation is squeezing the amount of income generated from traditional estate enterprises’, points out Sam Holt, head of the estates and farm agency at Strutt & Parker. ‘There is also growing anticipation of the upcoming autumn Budget as any changes to the capital gains and inheritance tax regimes may have an impact.’

Owning an estate is ‘a significant responsibility and the investment needed is vast’, adds Alice Keith of Knight Frank’s farms and estates team. ‘Sub-division is usually avoided by agents to preserve integrity, but sometimes it makes financial sense to split up property and land. It’s a terrible shame, but that’s the reality of it.’

Yet, there are definite upsides for buyers who could inject a vital boost and a fresh perspective; when the Walpole family sold Wolterton Hall in Norfolk in 2016, originally built for Horatio, brother of Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, its new owners undertook what was ultimately an award-winning refurbishment following years of vacancy, reviving the estate.

Adlington Hall in Cheshire, the seat of the Legh family from the 15th century to 2023, was bought, undivided, with a view to long-term investment. Alexander Davies-Terry, head of estate at the Fitzwilliam Wentworth estate in South Yorkshire, says that the Preservation Trust at Wentworth Woodhouse, the goliath mansion sold out of family ownership in 1989, is a ‘force for good, and beneficial for tourism’.

Matthew Beckett, The Country Seat blogger, cites ‘Tottenham House, Easton Neston, Brogyntyn Hall, Mawley Hall and Chettle House, which have all been sold directly from the long-standing family to new owners who have invested substantial amounts into restoring and improving them’. It seems there could be much for existing residents on old estates to look forward to, as long as things are sensitively done.

Alex Lawson, head of farm and estate sales at Savills, says that ‘communication and transparency with tenants and employees, where possible, is key. Nobody likes to see property empty and vacant period residential properties in particular can deteriorate quickly. Owners buy into the community that often comes with a historic rural estate and increasingly recognise their responsibility for contributing to the social value for all those directly and indirectly connected’. With that in mind, there’s no time like the present to invest in the past.

Lucy Denton is an architectural historian and writer

Credit: Getty

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Quality not quantity is the phrase that best describes the current state of play in the Scottish estates market. The highlight of the year to date is the launch in yesterday’s Country Life of the historic, 764-acre Newliston estate at Kirkliston, near Edinburgh, which has never before been seen on the open market.

Evelyn Channing of Savills Edinburgh office seeks ‘offers over £15 million’ for the ‘pastoral oasis’, with its Category A-listed mansion built in 1792–93 by Robert Adam within an important designed landscape, both designated of ‘outstanding architectural and historical interest’ by Historic Scotland. Despite its location 10 miles from Edinburgh city centre and four miles from Edinburgh airport, the estate is sheltered from the outside world by acres of gardens, woods and farmland that create a sense of seclusion and tranquillity within easy reach of central Scotland’s motorway network.

Only two families — the Dundases and the Hogs — have owned Newliston since the 15th century. According to Sir Robert Douglas’s Baronage of Scotland (1798), the Dundas family, descendants of Duncan, 1st Dundas of Newliston, owned Newliston and other properties for the best part of three centuries. In 1669, Elizabeth, the 8th and last Dundas of Newliston, married Sir John Dalrymple, later Earl of Stair, and it is to their son, Field Marshal the 2nd Earl of Stair, that Newliston owes much of what remains today.

Lord Stair had a successful career as a soldier and, from 1715–20, was ambassador to the court of France at Versailles, where he was greatly influenced by the layout of the gardens and grounds. However, he fell out of favour for a time in the wake of the South Sea Bubble scandal, and, according to estate records, ‘lived in comparative seclusion from 1722 to 1742, during the greater part of each year at the house of Newliston’.

In that time, he laid out the grounds with the aim of preparing ‘a worthy site for the great mansion designed for him by William Adam and reproduced in Vitruvius Scoticus’ — a collection of plans of public buildings and gentlemen’s houses mainly featuring Adam’s designs. Inspired by Versailles, the landscape at Newliston features sunken fences, canals, ponds, tree avenues, a ha-ha, a horseshoe-shaped drive and three gate lodges, all designed to complement Adam’s ‘great mansion’. However, that house was never built and, when Lord Stair died in 1747, his executors sold the Newliston estate to Roger Hog, a wealthy banker and the ancestor of the present owners.

Hog died in March 1789, after which his son, Thomas, and his wife, Lady Mary Maitland, revived the project to build the present house. They immediately turned to Adam’s son, Robert, who produced revised plans for a less ambitious house in December that year. Newliston was to be Adam Jnr’s last country house, for he died in March 1792 before it was quite finished. The wings featured in his father’s original plan were added in 1845, to the design of David Bryce, the architect of nearby Clifton Hall, who also added the balustrades around the raised forecourt.

The subject of an article in Country Life (February 26, 1916), Newliston House is built on three storeys with a subterranean basement. The classically symmetrical Georgian house is five windows wide with a central bay, to which were added Bryce’s wings, designed in Adam Jnr’s style. The house offers more than 18,000sq ft of elegant accommodation, including five reception rooms, 13 bedrooms, six bathrooms and a self-contained three-bedroom apartment.

Highlights of the interior include the impressive entrance hall with its Roman Doric-style columns; the panelled drawing room with its needlework panels designed by Adam Jnr and worked upon by Lady Mary (this room was doubled in size by the addition of a ballroom by Bryce with a sprung floor and full-height windows overlooking the east garden); the beautiful book-lined library; and the original dining room, now used as a sitting room and study, which boasts an elegant frieze and a handsome chimneypiece with a mirror above. Bryce’s west wing houses a homely kitchen with an electric Aga, the basement rooms, a wine cellar and a boiler room fitted with two oil-fired boilers installed in 2016.

Scattered across the estate are houses, cottages and commercial premises, let to generate a useful income. The three gate lodges are positioned by each of the entrance drives and the Inner Lodge sits within the parkland in front of Newliston House. Within the garden grounds, The Doo’cot was converted in the late 1970s from a 16th-century dovecot into a quirky, three-bedroom dwelling.

The Garden House, originally home to the head gardener, was extended over the years to become the second main house on the estate. Other cottages are located near Home Farm and the 18th-century stable block has been converted to residential use, with its Bell Tower adapted for use as a cookery school.

The principal farming operation on the Newliston estate is Milrig Farm, comprising Milrig Farmhouse, two cottages, a range of farm buildings and 535 acres of land let under two modern limited-duration tenancies until 2035. The River Almond forms the southern estate boundary and marks the divide between productive farmland and light industrial development on the south side of the river.

The Newliston Estate is for sale with Savills for offers over £15 million. For more information, call 0131–247 3720

Credit: John D Wood & Co

Villa Devereux, home of Ron Hickman and one of Jersey's most famous houses, comes up for sale

From the mind that brought us the Lotus Elan and the Black and Decker Workmate, comes this gorgeous modernist property,

One of Ireland’s great fishing rivers, much prized for the wild Atlantic salmon that run through it, the Munster Blackwater rises in the Kerry mountains and flows east for more than 100 miles through Mallow and Fermoy in Co Cork before entering Co Waterford at Lismore and draining into the Celtic Sea at Youghal. Over the centuries, the titled, rich and famous acquired vast estates along its banks, building grand country houses where they entertained lavishly and hunted, shot and fished to their hearts’ content.

Idyllic Fortwilliam, one of the hidden jewels of the Blackwater valley, sits in almost 400 acres of rolling pasture and ancient woodland overlooking the sparkling river, with far-reaching views to the Knockmealdown mountains on the Co Tipperary border. It’s less than two miles from the heritage town of Lismore, 34 miles from Cork and 55 minutes’ drive from Cork airport.

Now, the wonderfully private farming and sporting estate is for sale through Fermoy-based Michael H. Daniels and Rupert Sweeting of Knight Frank, either as a whole at €12m or in two lots. Lot 1, comprising Fortwilliam House with 289 acres of land, is priced at €10m; lot 2, 101 acres of prime agricultural land on the eastern estate border, is on offer at €2m.

Although Fortwilliam is less well known than nearby Lismore Castle, the Irish country seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, it boasts a history every bit as fascinating. In the early 18th century, the Gumbleton family from Kent acquired these lands; Richard Gumbleton built the first house on the site of an old castle to the west of the estate and named it Castlerichard after himself. That house now forms part of St Mary’s Abbey, Glencairn, the only Cistercian monastery for women in Ireland.

Three generations later, William Gumbleton built another house to the east and named it Fortwilliam. Then, in the early 1800s, a nephew, John Gumbleton, inherited the estate and demolished William’s house, rebuilding it in 1836 to the design of the renowned Pain brothers of Cork.

Fortwilliam was leased in the early 20th century to the actress and dancer Adele Astaire, elder sister of Fred; in 1932, she married Lord Charles Cavendish, second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire. The couple went to live at Lismore, which was given to them as a wedding present by the Duke. Lord Charles died there, aged only 38, in 1944, after which Lismore passed to his nephew, Lord Andrew Cavendish (later the 11th Duke and father of the present Duke) following Astaire’s remarriage to an investment banker in 1947.

A year earlier, the Gumbleton family had sold Fortwilliam to England’s richest man, Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, who reputedly bought it to impress Anne Sullivan, the daughter of a retired brigadier-general who lived at Glanmire, near Cork. Here, Nancy, as she was known, grew up as a hard rider to hounds during the glory days of hunting between the wars. Despite the age gap — Nancy was 31, the Duke 67 when they met in Ireland in 1946 — the couple shared a love of fishing, farming, stalking, hunting and racing; a year later, Nancy became his fourth Duchess.

The Duke died of a heart attack six years later, after which Nancy moved to a lodge on the family’s Eaton Hall estate in Cheshire, and, up until her death in 2003, divided her time between Eaton Lodge, the Westminster estate at Lochmore, Sutherland, and her Irish base, Bryanstown House in Co Kildare.

Horses remained her abiding passion; she will forever be remembered as the owner of the legendary Arkle, who carried her famous yellow-and-black colours — the black band in memory of her late husband — to successive victories in the Cheltenham Gold Cups of 1964, 1965 and 1966.

Back at Fortwilliam, where the young Nancy was first recruited to ‘do the flowers’, the Duke added various features, including the panelling in the dining room (said to have come from one of his yachts) and the gilded Louis XV-style boiseries in the drawing room (transferred from Eaton Hall in Cheshire).

The next owner was his friend Henry Drummond Wolff, the MP for Basingstoke in Hampshire. The transatlantic connection was later re-established when the estate was bought by the American socialite Mrs Murray Mitchell, who ran a donkey sanctuary there in the 1990s.

Fortwilliam, set at the end of a mile-long, tree-lined drive, is a captivating country house surprisingly full of light and life. Replete with most of its original features and fabric and sympathetically renovated and refurbished over the past 25 years, it offers some 10,215sq ft of living space on two floors over a basement, including four fine reception rooms and a dramatic double-height staircase hall, with six bedrooms and four bath-rooms on the first floor.

The lower ground floor houses the estate office, a billiard room, rod room and wine cellar. The Fisherman’s Cottage in the west wing provides four further bedrooms and three bathrooms that could be incorporated into the main house.

Landscaped grounds surround Fortwilliam, with a sunken garden and terrace to the east, a ha-ha to the south and a sweep of lawns to the front; to the west, stands of mature beech, lime and bamboo line the drive. The 2¼-acre walled garden, built in about 1840, is enclosed by high stone walls, lined inside with a brick skin to retain the sun’s warmth.

The outbuildings include an eight-box stable yard, a traditional stone farmyard and extensive modern farm buildings. Mature parkland, woods and pasture in excellent heart are all features of the estate, which includes a coveted 3¼ miles of double-bank salmon and sea-trout fishing on the majestic Blackwater.

Fortwilliam is for sale with Knight Frank and Michael H. Daniels. For more information and pictures, click here

Credit: Sotheby's International Realty

A tale of two cities: Former home of Charles Dickens on Hanover Terrace comes up for sale

His portrayals of London in his literature may have been bleak, but his summer home in the city was anything

Five magnificent country homes for sale, from a palatial Georgian masterpiece to an equestrian dream home in Hertfordshire

Our look at the finest homes to appear on the market via Country Life this week.

Credit: Chris Curl

A remarkable Edwardian country house in one of Herefordshire's most enviable locations hits the market for the first time

Whitney Court stands in the glorious Wye Valley and has been in the hands of the same family for more

Surrey — £7,500,000

Some houses just have great names. Fox Hollow is one of them. This seven-bedroom home near Windlesham in Surrey is a period delight and approached through wrought-iron gates.

On the inside, however, period charm is combined with modern comfort, the highlight of which is the Tom Howley kitchen/breakfast room (installed in 2023). Amenities are also beautiful gardens of some 2.25 acres and an indoor pool complex.

For sale with Knight Frank and Hamptons. See more pictures and details for this property.

Scottish Borders — £18,500,000

A castellated Tudor-Gothic mansion built in about 1815, Bowland House offers 16 bedrooms over three floors, as well as far-reaching views across sloping parkland.

If you'd like to explore the gardens and grounds, you might need a car, as the property comes with some 5,386 acres, including Caddonhead Moor. A further 2,684 acres is available via separate negotiation.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Buckinghamshire — £2,500,000

Listed Grade II, the Old Tile House is a most attractive 17th century home that offers six bedrooms over four floors. Don't worry, there's a lift!

The gardens extend to about an acre, but are award-winning, and feature a parterre, knot garden, rose garden, statue garden, laburnum walk and mature trees. Naturally, there's also a pond that is 'profuse' with water lilies.

For sale with Michael Graham. See more pictures and details for this property.

Lincolnshire — £20,000,000

For £20 million, you'd expect quite a bang for your buck. The good news is that the residential and farming estate of Walmsgate, in the beautiful Lincolnshire Wolds, delivers.

A principal farmhouse is located in the heart of the estate, and 15 further residential dwellings are included as well. Furthermore the estate comes with 1,829.9 acres of productive arable land, woodland and parkland.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Oban — £1,500,000

Island klaxon! This 270 acre island, surrounded by the stunning scenery of the west coast, is for sale and includes a three-bedroom farmhouse.

Named Torsa, the island's name is of Norse origin, meaning 'Thor's Island', and the sale also includes a ruined castle known as Casteal nan Con or the Dogs' Castle. The island is up for sale for the first time in 85 years.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Hampshire — £4,250,000

Very few things scream luxury like a private gate leading directly to the South Downs. Ripsley House offers just such wonders, as well as five bedrooms and three acres.

Dating from 1860, the property is unique to the area of Liphook in terms of design and architecture. Amenities on-site also include a tennis court, a swimming pool and a separate two-bedroom cottage.

For sale with Strutt and Parker. See more pictures and details for this property.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

The 850-year-old, Grade I-listed Beeleigh Abbey starred in Country Life’s architecture pages a couple of years ago, with a pair of articles: one on the history of this incredible medieval estate, and a sister article looking at the building’s later years in the custodianship of the Foyle family, of Foyle’s bookshop fame.

Following the death of Chrostopher Foyle a couple of years ago, Beeleigh Abbey is now for sale, along with its associated 366-acre estate beside the River Chelmer, a mile from the market town of Maldon, eight miles from Chelmsford, and 38 miles from central London. Trains to London Liverpool Street take half an hour, making this a medieval monastery from which you can commute.

The Chelmsford office of Strutt & Parker and Essex agents Whirledge & Nott quote a guide price of £5.45 million is for the whole, but the estate is also being offered in up to four lots.

The 9,743sq ft main house is on the market at £2.5m. It boasts five reception rooms, six bedrooms and six bathrooms.

The main house also comes with several outbuildings and a three-bedroom cottage, all set in 35 acres of gardens, grazing, woodland and wetland adjoining the River Chelmer.

There are also 319 acres of farmland for sale at £2.6m; several farm buildings offered at £200,000; and a former poultry building set in 10¼ acres of farmland, at £150.000.

The history here is extraordinary. The Abbey was founded in about 1180 near Maldon, Essex, as a monastery for the Order of Canons Regular of Prémontré in northern France (known as the Premonstratensians or White Canons),

Following the Dissolution, many of the abbey buildings were demolished and, in 1540, Henry VIII granted Beeleigh Abbey and its lands to Sir John Gate, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who was later executed for treason for supporting Lady Jane Grey.

In the 18th century, the Abbey was used as a public house, but, by the late 1800s, was in a ruinous state. Restoration of the medieval buildings was begun in 1912 by a Capt Grantham and subsequently by one Richard Edwin Thomas (the story of which was told in Country Life on September 30, 1922).

Beeleigh Abbey’s long association with the Foyle family began in 1943, when William Foyle, the co-founder in 1903 of the famous Foyles bookshop in London’s Charing Cross Road, happened upon it when boating on the Chelmer and was immediately captivated by the ancient building and its secluded woodland setting.

Having acquired the Abbey privately, he used it to house his vast collection of books and lived there until his death in 1963. His daughter, the notoriously autocratic Christina Foyle, inherited both the family business and the Beeleigh estate, where she lived with her army of cats until her own death in 1999.

The next owner of Beeleigh was William’s grandson, Christopher Foyle, who acquired it, not through inheritance, but using his own hard-earned cash, his aunt having left the bulk of her £60 million estate to the Foyle charitable foundation.

Foyle had worked for his aunt as a trainee manager in the 1960s, but, seeing little prospect of advancement within the firm and inspired by his love for aviation, he established a small air-taxi service in Luton. This he developed into Air Foyle HeavyLift, a major international freight operation flying mighty Russian Antonov planes capable of carrying anything from tanks and railway locomotives to emergency aid.

In 2000, he bought Beeleigh Abbey and a small proportion of his grandfather’s extensive library; the rest was sold at a Christie’s auction for £12 million in July that year.

With his wife, Catherine, he embarked on a four-year-long restoration of Beeleigh Abbey, its gardens and grounds, using a specialist team of builders, craftsmen, joiners and engineers. It was a remarkable undertaking that was duly recognised with the Maldon District Council Conservation Award in 2007, the RICS East of England Award in 2008 and the coveted RICS National Award for the best restored and conserved historical building in the whole of the UK.

In the course of the renovation, new plumbing and central-heating systems were installed, the kitchen and bathrooms were upgraded and the library roof was retiled. Many of the upstairs floors were rotten and were replaced with reclaimed Victorian oak timbers. Aged limestone flags were sourced from a French château and laid throughout much of the ground floor.

The legacy left by Christina’s cats was systematically eradicated, too, by ripping up floorboards and replacing whole sections of plasterwork. The gardens were rejuvenated with the addition of a large, heated Alitex aluminium greenhouse and lavish planting of trees, shrubs and borders, which, 20 years on, provide a wonderful backdrop to the Abbey’s ancient walls.

Beeleigh Abbey is for sale at £5.45 million — see more pictures and details.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

It’s Monday, the start of a new work week, and the weather at the weekend was bad. With that in mind, we are not going to get too clever with our property stuff today. We are going to, in the words of LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, ‘shut up and play the hits’.

And what a hit it is. Mount Offham in West Malling, Kent. Almost 10,000sq ft of opulent splendour in 31.6 acres of the Garden of England. Yours for offers in excess of £5 million with Savills. 

Originally constructed between 1840–70 by the Rhodes family, cousins of Queen Elizabeth II, the property wawa owned in the 1950s by Baron Plunkett, who was apparently something known as the ‘Master of the Queen’s Bedchamber’. More interestingly, he was also chairman of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and it is he who added many of the aesthetic features at Mount Offham, such as glazing bars, cornices and marble fireplaces.

Since then, the property has been in the care of its current owners since 1993, and has been lovingly maintained since then. Mount Offham is now a ‘charming and compact’ estate, with seven bedrooms in a primary residence, as well as a range of versatile commercial and leisure elements.

Arranged over four floors, the property is ideal for both family living and formal entertaining. There are all the usual hits of a grand house of this kind, namely high ceilings, exposed flooring, sash windows, dado rails, original shutters, fireplaces and bay windows.

We could go through it room-by-room, but best to just sit back and enjoy the pictures.

Outside, the excitement continues. Approached via a long, tree-lined driveway, the property and its park-like grounds are predominantly laid to lawn, with plenty of specimen trees and a lake beyond.

There is also an outdoor heated swimming pool, and an outdoor kitchen with Wolf appliances. A tennis court? Why yes of course.

For those interested in equestrian entertainment, a U-shaped stable block is on sight with 10 stalls, a barn, hay store and tack room, manege, lunging area and grazing paddocks.

But wait, there’s more. The property also features a grass air strip, authorised by the UK Border Force for international flights, and a helicopter hangar and apron. Further outbuildings, mostly for administrative use, make up the rest of the 31.6 acres. 

Mount Offham is for sale with Savills for £5 million. For more information and pictures, click here

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Take a look at some of the best homes to come to the market via Country Life in recent days.

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The majestic Ludstone Hall is one of Shropshire's greatest privately-owned country estates — and it's now looking for a new owner.

Credit: Fine and Country

A gorgeous Elizabethan manor with all the modern trimmings that may have been home to Anne Boleyn

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It’s extremely rare for an entire Dorset landed estate to find its way onto the open market, so it’s good to see the Bridehead Estate come up for sale. What’s even better is that this is a property with simply immense charm, with thousands of acres of land, dozens of properties, a nature reserve, and a Grade II*-listed mansion at its heart. The house — simply known as Bridehead — is a joyous home, full of surprises.

As well as the nine individually-named bedrooms and the usual country house staples (drawing room, library and so on) it comes with a prayer room, a flower room and even an ironing room. The wider estate, meanwhile, includes an entire village, and a cricket ground. In short, even the most hard-nosed of prospective purchasers will find much at Bridehead that appeals; David Hebditch of Carter Jonas in Taunton quotes a guide price of £30 million for the estate as a whole.

The present custodian of Bridehead, Sir Philip Williams, who took over the running of the estate in 1985, is the seventh generation of his family to live there and the latest to uphold the family’s long tradition of public service, both as a magistrate and as High Sheriff of the county in 2016.

Now, after almost 40 years at the helm, Sir Philip has decided to sell the spectacular 2,047-acre property with its imposing, Grade II*-listed manor house, now in need of modernisation, which stands at the heart of a diverse residential, farming, sporting and conservation estate.

So what of those things which make this such an opportunity? Firstly, there is the estate’s enviable location within the lush west Dorset countryside, two miles from the small rural village of Winterbourne Abbas and seven miles north of Dorset’s famous Jurassic coastline.

Secondly, the substantial property portfolio that includes not only the aforementioned 18,683sq ft Regency main house — currently set up with six reception rooms, a prayer room, office, nine principal bedrooms, four bathrooms, servants rooms and attics — but also the village of Littlebredy and various estate cottages, some 32 houses in all, most let on assured shorthold tenancies.

Thirdly, there is a portfolio of six farms and woodlands let on short-term farm business tenancies.

And fourthly, the sale includes a substantial area of mostly ancient woodland that has been managed by a professional forester for the past 12 years, with a view to establishing a sustainable yield of timber within a robust habitat with sporting potential.

Even the history of the place is enticing. Bridehead’s story begins in the late 1700s, Robert Williams, described in his History of Parliament entry as ‘a self-made man [who] became a leading London banker and a director of the East India Company’, purchased estates at Littlebredy, Dorset, and Moor Park, Hertfordshire, and, in 1807, secured himself a seat in Parliament as MP for Dorchester.

The Littlebredy lands, listed as ‘Brydian’ in the Domesday survey, were owned by Cerne Abbey until the Dissolution and by the Mellor family in the 18th century. They were absentee landlords and neglected the estate, especially the manor house, which was in a state of disrepair when Williams acquired it in 1797.

At this time, his main estate was Moor Park and building activities at Littlebredy were limited at first, although he visited frequently and, having selected a site around the source of the River Bride as the location for his new manor house, which he named Bridehead, he began to plan, plant, landscape and build.

When Williams died in 1814, his estates and much of his personal fortune were inherited by his elder son, another Robert, who also became senior partner in the family bank, Williams, Son, Moffat and Burgess, later Williams Deacon & Co, which was hit by a financial crisis in late 1825.

Having decided to sell Moor Park, he wrote from Bridehead to the then home secretary Sir Robert Peel: ‘I find a great inconvenience in having two large places in the country, without time to be as much at either as I should so wish, and have therefore thought of parting with one. This is my native county, and a favourite residence to myself and family, and having lately added much to its extent by a large purchase and opportunity occurring of more, I have made up my mind to sell Moor Park and its appendages…’ In the event, Peel declined the purchase and Moor Park was sold a short time later to Lord Grosvenor.

With Bridehead confirmed as the family seat, Williams Jnr commissioned the eminent architect Peter Frederick Robinson to work on the estate between 1830 and 1833, during which time he rebuilt the manor house and designed both the entrance lodge to the park and several cottages in the model village of Littlebredy.

In 1838, a new stable block in the Gothic style was built to designs by architect Benjamin Ferrey, who later extended the house and rebuilt the village church and various cottages.

According to its Historic England listing, the landscape of Bridehead and Littlebredy, including the early-18th-century park and garden incorporating the ornamental estate village created by Robinson and extended by Ferrey, was completed by 1842.

The picturesque cricket ground was created in the park in 1900. In about 1850, the house was extended westwards, with the addition of the south-facing library, billiards room and conservatory (now a swimming pool), but has since remained largely unchanged.

The Bridehead Estate is for sale at £30 million via Carter Jonas — see more pictures and details.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Buyers prepared to consider a renovation project will surely be tempted by the launch onto the market of a rare find: Lodge Farm at Castle Acre, which is being sold via Savills on behalf of the Holkham estate. A guide price of £2.75m is quoted for the substantial former farmhouse with its outbuildings, farmstead and shoot lodge set in some 21 acres of gardens, pasture, meadow and woodland. Sounds great? It is. But as the pictures here show, you'll have to be prepared to put some serious work in.

Although few may be aware of its existence, Lodge Farm sits in undulating countryside, a mile north-east of the charming and historic village of Castle Acre with its Norman castle, ruined Cluniac priory and medieval church of St James, three miles from the Georgian market town of Swaffham, 11 miles from Fakenham and 18 miles from Brancaster.

Originally an important farmhouse on the Holkham estate, Lodge Farm, which is unlisted, has been let to long-term tenants over many years and now requires updating and refurbishment throughout.

The original approach to Lodge Farm was from a lane to the west, over a drive that swept through a hedged avenue via open, park-like grounds and through woodland before arriving at the handsome south façade. The drive is shown clearly in old images and will need to be reinstated by the new owner to provide access and re-create the sense of arrival that the house deserves.

Built of the distinctive Holkham estate brick, the main house is Georgian with a substantial Victorian addition. It offers more than 8,700sq ft of living space, with five reception rooms, nine bedrooms and five bathrooms, the most important of which are laid out along the south side of the house, overlooking the grounds and the countryside beyond.

A courtyard of single-storey buildings to the north of the house currently provides garaging, stabling, a workshop and stores, but could be converted to a variety of uses.

As is Lodge Farm itself, the gardens are a blank canvas, ripe for landscaping, but with an old structure that provides a useful starting point, whereas the farmstead to the north of the house, which incorporates the former walled garden, combines both traditional and modern barns that could also be converted to a number of alternative uses.

Lodge Farm is for sale at £2.75m — see more details and pictures.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Over in north-west Somerset, within the 267 square miles of the Exmoor National Park — roughly two-thirds of which lies in Somerset and one-third in Devon — Alice Keith of Knight Frank is also handling the sale of the historic, 2,075-acre Lanacre estate, near Withypool, in the heart of the national park and close to the north Devon border.

The ancient manorial estate dates from Saxon times and, following the Norman Conquest, was designated a royal forest. The manor was ‘disafforested’ in 1301, but remained in Crown ownership until 1651. Thereafter, the land was divided into Higher and Lower Lanacre until, in 1843, Lower Lanacre was established as the main farmstead on the estate, which is now being offered, either as a whole, at a guide price of £4.5m, or in two lots.

Lot 1, on offer at a guide of £3.5m, is the 198-acre main farmstead, comprising the principal farmhouse — a large, south-facing, five-bedroom Georgian farmhouse overlooking the River Barle and Withypool Common — together with Lanacre Cottage, two semi-detached bungalows, a converted stone barn, stabling and modern farm buildings and about 195 acres of pasture and woodland.

The farmstead is ring-fenced by the land, which is totally private, with no public rights of way. A small family shoot has previously been run here, with walked-up shooting across the moor providing some excellent, quick-fire snipe shooting. The River Barle, famous for its brown trout and salmon, runs directly through the estate, which boasts more than 2,700 yards of private double-bank fishing.

A guide price of £1m is quoted for lot 2, about 1,878 acres of moorland on Withypool Common, including atmospheric Withypool Hill with its prehistoric stone circles — one of only two on Exmoor — and a range of Bronze Age mounds known as Brightworthy Barrows. The ancient moorland is sold subject to various rights, including common grazing rights. The lord of the manor plays a key role in the running of the common and, ultimately, controls its environmental management as the lead signatory on any relevant contracts.

The Lanacre Estate is for sale with Knight Frank as a whole (£4.5 million) or in two lots. For more information and pictures, click here

Credit: Knight Frank

For sale for the first time in 50 years, an unlisted Sussex farmhouse surrounded by a 'thriving 117-acre nature reserve'

https://www.knightfrank.com/properties/residential/for-sale/wards-lane-wadhurst-east-sussex-tn5/CHO180010

Credit: Fine and Country

Red-brick walls, a thatched roof, a barn and an EPC rating of A. This home of the future in Dorset looks suspiciously like the past

At Godwins House near Christchurch, tradition and modernity embrace to create exquisite results.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

A gorgeous farmhouse next door to Stonehenge with a gardens by an iconic Chelsea gold medal winner

at Moor Hatches, while away the hours fishing on the Avon, enjoying the amazing gardens, or exploring this seven bedroom

22 superb homes for sale from £260k to £15 million, as seen in Country Life

From huge estates to delightful cottages, there really is something for anyone thinking of moving to the country.

One of the great properties in the East Midlands has come up for sale: the prestigious 955-acre Allexton Hall estate, which straddles the border between Rutland and Leicestershire — four miles west of Uppingham and 13 miles north of Market Harborough, from where there is a regular fast train service to London St Pancras (under an hour).

The agents, Savills Farms & Estates, quote a guide price of £17m for the ‘rare and exceptional’ residential and amenity estate.

Allexton’s existence dates from medieval times, when it was part of the Royal Forest and the first manor was a moated fortalice on the banks of the Eye Brook.

This was superseded in the 16th century by the original Allexton Hall, of which little is known apart from the fact that the house was downgraded from a manor to a farmhouse in 1843, and the old house was probably ‘a hall house with four bays of structure’.

It was unoccupied in 1899 when the Wilson family decided that the Allexton Hall estate should be sold and, in July 1900, it was bought by George Pauling, a wealthy engineering contractor and director of a railway company that built a line between Newark and Market Harborough.

In 1902, Pauling had Allexton Hall almost totally rebuilt in the ‘Elizabethan Manorial style’ to designs by the architect William J. Shearburn. Local Ketton stone was used and the work was done largely by local craftsmen.

According to historian Vivian Anthony, ‘all the rooms were on a grand scale, including, on the ground floor, the Hall, Lounge Hall, Billiard Room and 50ft-long Lounge.

On the first floor, there were eight family and guest bedrooms and the private chapel. There were also three maids’ rooms and three manservants’ rooms. Other estate workers lived in the three timbered cottages near the gates to the village’.

Pauling died in London in 1920, after which various attempts were made to sell the hall, manor and land. The estate passed through several hands in the in 1930s, 1950s and 1990s, before being acquired by technology investor Sanjay Mehta in 2008.

During his ownership, both Allexton Hall and its estate have been restored to their imperial glory, with the installation of a biomass boiler to service the estate properties.

The purchase includes the converted former stables and coach house, two stable cottages and the east and west gate lodges, all currently let on Assured Shorthold Tenancies (ASTs).

Allexton Hall and Estate are for sale at £17 million — see more pictures and details.

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Bedfordshire — £4,000,000

Listed Grade II*, situated on the site of a former fortified manor house and with a moat, Bletsoe Castle is a large family home steeped in history but oozing modern charm.

Set in over 24 acres of gardens and paddocks, and with a tennis court, this limestone property has nine bedrooms, six reception rooms, six bathrooms and a two-bedroom detached cottage on the grounds.

For sale with Michael Graham. See more pictures and details for this property.

North Yorkshire — £7,000,000

A rare opportunity to acquire that 'Goldilocks' estate (not too big, not too small) in the Howardian Hills AONB. At some 211 acres, plus additional sporting rights, the estate is centred around the Georgian farmhouse that was extended and remodelled in the Arts-and-Crafts style in 1926.

At Swathgill, the owners have undertaken a regular and ongoing inmprovement programme, which means that the house is beset with all the necessary comforts and more, such as a heated indoor pool, gym, cinema room and 10 bedrooms.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Kent — £3,750,000

Grow your own wine in the Kent AONB at Chalksole Manor, a handsome double-fronted brick and timber-beamed residence with 34 acres that's less than an hour on the train from London.

The traditionally styled 1920s Arts-and-Crafts home offers 7,600sq ft of accomodation over three floors, 10 bedrooms, an indoor pool, and two detached properties on the estate.

For sale with Strutt and Parker. See more pictures and details for this property.

Cumbria — £1,750,000

A house with 'architectural merit in one of the UK's most beautiful locations', this property also includes the title Lordship of the Manor of Lowick and is only a few miles from the shores of Coniston Water.

The Manor of Lowick dates its history back to 1091, but these days is a five-bedroom family home situated in 24 acres of unspoilt Lake District countryside.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Cornwall — £2,250,000

Believed to have been designed by the Cornish architect Alfred Cornelius, Highland near Portloe is a five-bedroom detached house that might occupy one of the finest positions in England.

A small estate of some 2.76 acres, the property boasts a meadow, wildflower area, photovoltaic panels and a Cornish orchard. The interiors could easily be refreshed, making this a prime opportunity to create the perfect family home on the south Cornish coast.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

East Sussex — £2,500,000

17 acres of idyllic rural countryside, including delightful landscaped gardens, orchard, ancient woodland, natuarl ponds and fields, all set around a 15th entury thatched home.

Doucegrove Farm offers five bedrooms and plenty of period charm, while occupying an enviable location just two miles to the south of Great Dixter house and gardens, with London less than an hour by train.

For sale with Phillips and Stubbs. See more pictures and details for this property.

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Credit: Janna Dixon photography/Lillicrap Chilcott

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Northamptonshire — £1,650,000

A 19th century mill converted into a wonderful seven-bedroom house.

There is garaging, stables and a paddock in this home surrounded by countryside.

For sale with Michael Graham. See more pictures and details for this property.

Buckinghamshire — £2,750,000

A Jacobean-style, Grade II-listed house with painted ceilings, secret passageways and murals.

The mix of styles inside is something to behold, but it's a seven-bedroom house with staff quarters and a great location.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Hampshire — £24,000,000

A thousand acres of Hampshire to the east of Salisbury, this is a vast estate on the market.

As you'd expect, it includes a huge main house, cottages, further properties and a nine-bedroom shooting lodge.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Wiltshire — £3,750,000

A 95-acre farm once part of the Bowood Estate, with 15 stables and extensive paddocks.

There are also lawns, a swimming pool and an equestrian arena.

For sale with Strutt & Parker. See more pictures and details for this property.

Cornwall — £2,500,000

Cornish architect Alfred Cornelius designed this house above the waves in Portloe, near Truro.

It's a five bedroom home with a self-contained annexe and just under three acres.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Oxfordshire — £5,000,000

Right in the heart of the village of Kingham, just moments down the road from Daylesford, this is the sort of Cotwolds house that you dream of.

Beautiful inside and out, it's a six-bedroom home with a gues barn, a cottae and a pool.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

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Last week saw the launch onto the market — for the first time in 101 years — of the historic 1,763-acre Glemham Hall estate. On the outskirts of Little Glemham, it is seven miles from Aldeburgh on Suffolk’s magical heritage coast, eight miles from Woodbridge and 14 miles from the county town of Ipswich. Tim Fagan of Strutt & Parker quotes a guide price of £19 million for the estate with its Grade I-listed mansion house set in some 200 acres of formal gardens and parkland with frontage to the River Alde, in-hand and let farms, a farmhouse and cottages, which is offered either as a whole or in its constituent parts.

Although the Glemham family of east Suffolk were already established as landowners in the area from the early 15th century, they didn’t acquire Little Glemham until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1540s. According to The History of Parliament (1604–29), Thomas Glemham of Glemham Hall substantially enlarged the estate by purchasing former monastic lands, thereby turning the family into important east Suffolk landowners.

An article in Country Life on January 1, 1910, attributes the building of ‘this delightful sample of our Early Renaissance style’ to Thomas’s son, Sir Henry Glemham, who married a daughter of Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Lord High Treasurer, thanks to whose patronage Sir Henry became the first member of his family to sit in Parliament.

He died at Little Glemham in 1632 and was succeeded by his son, Sir Thomas, a career soldier who was described on his death in 1648 as ‘a gentleman of noble extraction and a fair but impaired fortune’, which resulted in the eventual sale of Glemham to the North family, later Earls of Guilford, in 1708.

Between then and 1722, a young Dudley North remodelled Glemham Hall, although, according to Country Life, ‘the illustrations show that at the back of the house little alteration was made to the old hall beyond replacing the more important mullioned windows with sashes.

Those in the attics remained unchanged on this elevation and so did the gables above them. But the main entrance front was given a full Palladian flavour, and a very dull attic storey was raised up in brickwork entirely to hide the roof.

The porch and bays were removed and long lines of sash windows inserted. Inside, the older hall was retained, but the screen was replaced by four fluted Corinthian columns and the walls wainscoted with the large panels then in vogue, and painted white. A portion of the wall at the back was also removed, so that a great archway connects the hall with the staircase’. Enclosed formal gardens were created with oak and lime avenues to the north and south.

In 1789, Dudley Long North inherited Glemham Hall and, two years later, commissioned Humphry Repton to produce a Red Book. Many of the suggestions he made for the landscape, if not the hall, were carried out, including the removal of the old manor house, the filling-in of the moats and the extension of the park to the north beyond the turnpike road (now the A12).

Following the early-19th-century remodelling of the park, the North family made relatively few changes to the house, garden or park and, in July 1921, the 8th Earl of Guilford put the 2,900-acre estate up for sale. It was acquired, in 1923, by Capt John Murray Cobbold of the Suffolk brewing family, who, with his wife, Lady Blanche, daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, retained the park and laid out new gardens within the original 18th-century walled and hedged enclosures.

A fine sportsman and an outstanding shot, Capt Cobbold worked in the family brewery between the wars, becoming chairman on his father’s death in 1929. A lifelong supporter of Ipswich Town football club, he financed the club’s transition from amateur to professional status in 1938–39; his wife, Lady Blanche, would become the only woman president of a major football club. Wounded in France in 1917, Capt Cobbold re-joined the Scots Guards in 1939 and was killed, aged 47, when a V-1 flying bomb hit the Guards Chapel, London SW1, during Sunday morning service on June 18, 1944; more than 100 worshippers died that day.

Lady Blanche lived on at Glemham Hall until her death, aged 89, in 1987, whereupon the estate passed to her son, Patrick. When he died suddenly in 1994, he left the estate to his nephew, Maj Philip Hope-Cobbold, who was born at Glemham Hall in 1943 and died in 2020; his son, Tom, inherited and lives at the hall with his wife and family. Affectionately known as ‘The Galloping Major’, Hope-Cobbold was a distinguished soldier, a larger-than-life character with a wicked sense of humour, who was the last of the Cobbolds to serve on the board of their beloved Ipswich Town Football Club.

With the family brewery long gone, the new custodian, with his wife, Raewyn, who predeceased him in 2016, embarked on a series of corporate, social and cultural events in order to finance the upkeep of the 34,000sq ft hall, which boasts seven main reception rooms, a conservatory, 12 main bedrooms, five dressing rooms, 19 attic rooms (the former servants’ quarters), kitchens, domestic offices and extensive cellars.

Weddings, christenings, funerals, wakes, barbecues, Sunday lunches and guided tours of the house, with a hilarious running commentary from the Major himself, were all grist to the mill; the annual FolkEast heritage and music festival was the icing on the cake.

With its air of faded opulence, the hall harks back to its heyday between the two World Wars, when 20 or more staff and an army of gardeners looked after the imposing main house and its 15 acres of gardens. Today, surrounded by 183 acres of Grade II-listed parkland, Glemham Hall remains the beating heart of a traditional country estate comprising more than 1,000 acres of in-hand land— a mix of arable, river meadow and woodland — a 526-acre let farm with a Grade II-listed, 17th-century farmhouse and seven cottages, with further cottages available if required.

Glemhall Hall is for sale as a whole with Strutt and Parker for £19 million. For more information and pictures, click here

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Tired and weary, as Robert the Bruce’s depleted army retreated from the Battle of Dalrigh in 1306, its soldiers hastily discarded their weapons into a nearby lochan as they fled for their lives, earning this stretch of water its name, Lochan nan Arm, which translates to ‘Lochan of the Weapons’. According to local legend, Robert the Bruce's own sword still lies beneath the surface.

By rights, it should have been the end of The Bruce’s hopes of power; it was certainly his darkest hour. His army had already been hammered by a sneak attack in the night from English troops at the Battle of Methven earlier in the summer, so when the MacDougalls cornered what was left of the Bruce’s forces, they all but wiped them out.

What followed — the tale of the cave, and the spider, and Robert the Bruce resolving to try, try and try again — has entered folklore. Bruce pulled himself back together, raised a new force with the help of the MacDonalds, routed the MacDougalls, then eventually went on to defeat the English at Bannockburn and secure Scotland’s independence.

History buffs, then, will be thrilled that the site of the Battle of Dalrigh is currently for sale as part of the extensive Auchreoch estate. Consisting of 1,520 acres in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, it is on the market with Galbraith for offers over £2 million as a whole or in two lots.

Almost three miles to the north-west of the village of Crianlarich, Perthshire, Auchreoch is mostly Grade 6.3 agricultural land with dramatic topography, ranging from 170m (558ft) to 650m (2,133ft) above sea level and incorporating a 320-acre, SSSI native pine forest named Coille Coire Chuilc, which contains a tributary to the River Tay.

‘The woodland at Auchreoch, together with the extensive hill ground, offers a superb position and great opportunity for potential enhancement and diversification projects with a Natural Capital focus,’ says Galbraith’s Iain Paterson, who suggests it could lend itself to, ‘woodland creation, ecotourism related enterprises, rewilding, conservation and biodiversity-enhancement orientated projects or such similar focused interests, all subject to obtaining the required permissions.’

‘Auchreoch also offers the potential for sporting interests, with the possibility of red- and roe-deer stalking and grouse shooting’.

For sale at £2m — see more pictures and details.

With gracious country living and the environment in mind, Daniel Rees of Savills in Cardiff (07968 550419) is handling the sale of the unspoilt, 321-acre Trewern estate, near Narberth, Pembrokeshire, which offers considerable scope for development at a guide price of £3.25m for the whole.

Enjoyed for many years by its US-based English owner, who can no longer spend enough time there, Trewern occupies an idyllic and private position on the River Taf near Whitland. The estate is a stone’s throw from the former Norman stronghold of Narberth, a lively small market town huddled around a hillside main street lined with colourful Georgian and Edwardian houses, within easy driving distance of the beaches and seaside towns of Pembrokeshire’s national park.

At the heart of the estate stands handsome, Grade II-listed Trewern Mansion, described in its 1985 listing as ‘a fine, large, early-19th-century house with good late-Georgian interior detailing, the residence of the Benyon family’. Well maintained throughout, the house offers more than 11,000sq ft of living space on three floors, comprising three reception rooms, six bedrooms and three bathrooms on the ground and first floors, with unused attic rooms on the second floor suitable for conversion to additional bedrooms. Estate buildings include a detached three-bedroom cottage, a three-bedroom gamekeeper’s cottage set away from the main house, outbuildings, garages and the semi-ruins of an old home farm.

Trewern estate offers an interesting mix of land suitable for cropping or silage, grazing, rough grazing and rewilding, with large areas of established and newly planted woodland. It also boasts a small commercial driven-pheasant and duck shoot, with generous numbers of snipe and woodcock, and 1½ miles of salmon and sea-trout fishing on the River Taf. Gross receipts from shooting and grazing total some £50,000 a year.

Trewern Estate is for sale with Savills Cardiff for £3.25 million. For more information and pictures, click here

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As Strutt & Parker’s head of farms and estates for Scotland, Robert McCulloch is accustomed to keeping his ear to the ground. His latest analysis of the arcane workings of the Scottish estates scene identifies some significant recent trends in the market north of the Border.

A stellar year in 2022 saw 23 estates, with an average size of 5,133 acres, either sold or going under offer at an average guide price of £8.2 million. In 2023, the number of estates sold fell slightly to 22, despite a 33% increase in the number of estates for sale. The average acreage of estates sold in 2023 was 3,904, whereas the average sale price slipped to £7.2m, a 12% decline year on year.

Overall, the conversion rate of estates sold fell from 77% in 2022 (23 estates out of 30 for sale) to 55% in 2023 (22 estates out of 40 for sale), with Strutt & Parker claiming market leadership with seven out of 22 sales. At the same time, an increasingly jittery market saw the number of off-market transactions jump from 39% in 2022 to 55% in 2023.

It all made for a tough year for selling agents, a view confirmed by Evelyn Channing of Savills, who reveals that ‘demand for land suitable for commercial tree planting was re-calibrated, leading to a drop in upland farmland values by up to 25% from their peak in mid 2022’.

Of six major estate sales achieved by Savills in 2023, five were to private UK-based buyers, four of whom were buying for natural capital. Meanwhile, arable land and lowland pasture sales remained strong, as agricultural buyers sought to acquire additional acreage, especially in strong farming areas such as the Scottish Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, and Aberdeenshire.

For Strutt & Parker, 2023 kicked off in style with the sale of the remote, 3,380-acre Tayvallich estate near Lochgilphead in Argyll, which came to the market in September 2022 with a guide price of £10.465m for the whole. Another prime target for natural-capital buyers, the spectacular mixed-use coastal estate occupies a little-known, but picturesque and ecologically important peninsula between the Sound of Jura and Knapdale peninsula on Scotland’s west coast.

Tayvallich’s assets range from the 1,686-acre Drimnagall farming estate, several native woodland sites and various houses and buildings, to the scenic, 880-acre Danna Island, which comprises a boathouse, jetties, houses, small islands and more than five miles of coastline. It went under offer in November 2022 to Highlands Rewilding, one of a series of environmental enterprises founded by climate campaigner Jeremy Leggett; the sale was completed in spring 2023.

A further two remote and scenic coastal estates found buyers through Strutt & Parker in 2023. The first of these was the 2,396-acre Husabost estate near Dunvegan, on the north-west coast of the Isle of Skye, which came to the market in May with a guide price of ‘offers over £1.25m’ and sold in the autumn to ‘a British buyer with local roots’, Mr McCulloch reveals.

Once part of the land holdings of the MacLeod family, whose seat is the nearby Dunvegan Castle, Husabost comprises a main house in need of complete refurbishment, a home farm, tenanted crofts and some five miles of sea frontage, with magnificent views to the Cuillin Mountains and the Outer Hebrides.

The other was the 1,863-acre Grigadale estate on Argyll’s Ardnamurchan Peninsula, the most westerly point of the British mainland, known as ‘the headland of the great seas’. Launched in May with a guide price of ‘offers over £1.2m’, it was sold by the autumn, again to a British buyer.

Described by the agents as ‘a magnificent amenity estate in one of the most peaceful and unexplored parts of Scotland’, Grigadale comprises a three-bedroom farmhouse and farm buildings surrounded by pasture, rough grazings and open hill; sport includes deer stalking, rough shooting and trout fishing on three lochs.

With the Cheviot Hills to the south and the more open farmland of Berwickshire to the north, the central Scottish Borders not only offers some of the most beautiful countryside in the south of Scotland, but is a region renowned for its productive farmland, forestry and exciting country sports. Here, Savills handled the sale of Linton Burnfoot Farm, a ring-fenced 540-acre farm in an unspoilt and tranquil valley spanning Kale Water, seven miles from Kelso and 12 miles from Jedburgh.

Run in recent years as a stock farm producing fat lambs, it was also the setting for an excellent driven-pheasant and duck-flighting shoot. Launched onto the market in July 2022, as a whole for ‘offers over £3.1m’ or in three lots, the majority of the land was acquired in 2023 by the Foresight Sustainable Forestry Company, which plans to repurpose the hill ground for forestry. The handsome Georgian main house was sold separately with about 50 acres to a lifestyle buyer for ‘offers over £800,000’. Some 40 acres of arable land was bought by a neighbouring farmer.

There was strong interest from southern buyers in two well-run traditional farms in prime Border locations, which sold for 20% more than the asking price in the latter half of 2023, Mrs Channing reveals. The first of these was the 303-acre Old Graden Farm, which sits in a private and picturesque setting to the south-east of Kelso, overlooking rolling farmland with views towards the Cheviot Hills. Strategically planted woodlands and the varied topography produce challenging driven pheasants, with ponds providing excellent duck-flighting and walked-up snipe shooting also available. Launched in July for ‘offers over £2.1m’, Old Graden was sold by September. 

Howden Farm near Selkirk was a late entrant to the market in mid September at a guide price of ‘offers over £2.3m’. Following 29 viewings and five offers, an early November closing date resulted in a December sale, with entry in January 2024.

The immaculate, all-grass livestock farm comprises a late-Georgian farmhouse, two semi-detached cottages, traditional and modern farm buildings, 323 acres of grassland and 67 acres of amenity woodland and shelter belts. It sits amid peaceful rolling countryside on the southern lower banks of Ettrick Water, a tributary of the Tweed, two miles south-west of Selkirk in the heart of the Scottish Borders.

Owned by the same family for 300 years, the 1,962-acre Finegand estate at Glenshee in the Cairngorms National Park, 20 miles from Blairgowrie and 32 miles from Perth, was the pride of Galbraith’s farms and estates portfolio when it came to the market in September 2022 with an asking price of £5m. ‘The vendors were delighted when a UK buyer with traditional farming and sporting interests bought the estate in February 2023,’ says selling agent Emma Chalmers.

The impressively diverse Highland estate boasts farming, forestry, sporting and conservation interests, centred on the original Finegand Farmhouse, with a range of farm buildings, six cottages and a former steading at the north offering a potential development opportunity. The lands at Finegand comprise permanent pasture, rough grazings, heather hill and woodland, rising from about 310 metres (1,017ft) above sea level to some 794 metres (2,605ft) at its highest point.

The farming enterprise is currently run in conjunction with a shepherding contract for some 500 ewes. The estate offers a range of traditional sports that include red, roe and fallow deer stalking and walked-up grouse shooting.

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The greatest estates sold around Britain in the last 12 months

Farms and estates did not lose their appeal in 2023, with some local buyers and even a happy ending to

Direct support for English farmers may be on the way out, but there’s still a huge appetite for land and estates among investors, lifestyle buyers, farmers and conservationists, as sales achieved in 2023 clearly indicate.

For Alex Lawson, head of rural agency at Savills, the standout estate sale of the year was that of the illustrious Adlington Hall, which lies within Cheshire’s golden triangle, five miles east of Wilmslow and seven miles north of Macclesfield. Family seat of the Legh family since 1315, the 1,921-acre estate came to the market in September 2022 for the first time in more than 700 years, at a guide price of £30m through Savills and Mark Wiggin Estate Agency, and was sold as a whole to a long-term investor in autumn 2023.

At its heart stands Grade I-listed Adlington Hall, a handsome, 20,000sq ft quadrangular building, which stands on the site of a Saxon hunting lodge and was rebuilt in two phases in the Tudor and Stuart period, restored after the Civil War and extended in the mid 18th century by Charles Legh, who also built the matching Grade II*-listed stable courtyard and extensively remodelled the park and gardens.

The north section of the historic mansion houses the magnificent Tudor Great Hall and its famous organ, forever associated with Legh’s friend, composer Frideric Handel. The surrounding estate comprises six let farms and 22 houses and cottages, plus various ancillary buildings and parcels of land.

Will Matthews, head of farms and estates at Knight Frank, oversaw the successful sale of two contrasting Oxfordshire estates — Golder Manor Farm at Pyrton near Watlington, and Woodleys near Woodstock — both launched in the latter half of 2022 at guide prices of £25m and £16m respectively.

Once part of the Earl of Macclesfield’s Shirburn Castle estate, the Golder Manor Farm sale was essentially a farmland and property deal involving 613-acre Golder Manor Farm, with its Grade II-listed farmhouse, traditional farm buildings and six semi-detached cottages on high ground in the heart of south Oxfordshire, on the western edge of the Chilterns and within easy reach of Oxford and London. Included in the sale was a pretty Grade II-listed former vicarage set in almost six acres of gardens and grounds with views over wildflower meadows and parkland towards Shirburn Castle, and a portfolio of income-producing properties that included nine cottages and the Spire & Spoke pub. The estate was eventually acquired as an investment by a local family, who will continue to farm the land.

One of Oxfordshire’s least well known, but most impeccably situated country houses, timeless Grade II-listed Woodleys at Wootton, three miles from Woodstock and 10 miles from Chipping Norton, sits in wooded gardens, grounds and parkland at the centre of its 230-acre residential and farming estate, with spectacular southerly views over the Duke of Marlborough’s estate to Blenheim Palace gleaming in the distance.

Historically, the parish of Wootton was part of a royal hunting forest that was cleared and cultivated in medieval times. Following the enclosure of Wootton in 1770, Thomas Southam, who already owned land at Woodleys inherited from his grandfather, was awarded an estate there of 86 acres. According to the Victoria County History: Oxford (1983), it was presumably he who built the house that was bought in 1818 by Thomas Thornhill.

His son sold it in 1881 to Edwin Ponsonby, whose descendants owned it thereafter and were the recent vendors. Woodleys’s ‘extraordinary location’ attracted interest from around the world and the estate was sold as a whole to an international buyer with completion in January 2023, Mr Matthews reveals.

Wiltshire’s prosperous Chalke Valley, voted ‘The Best Place to Live in the South-West’ in a 2022 Times survey, was described as ‘picturesque countryside at its spring-scented best, with Saxon churches, thatched cottages, rolling downs and a series of villages strung out along the 13-mile chalk escarpment between Salisbury and Shaftesbury’. This is the backdrop to the idyllic 600-acre West Chase residential and sporting estate, which came to the market through Savills in June 2022 with a guide price of ‘excess £18m’ and sold as a whole in 2023.

West Chase was acquired by the vendors in the early 1990s and transformed from a traditional working farm into a wonderfully private, ring-fenced country estate with 387 acres of arable farmland, 142 acres of pasture, 48 acres of woodland and views ‘to die for’ over neighbouring Dorset to the Purbecks and the Isle of Wight. It also boasts a handsome, five-bedroom main house remodelled by William Bertram, a walled garden and tennis court, courtyard of converted farm buildings, secondary farmhouse, estate cottages and extensive equestrian facilities, with direct access to the bridleways of Cranborne Chase.

Farming and sport have existed in perfect harmony at The Mill House and its 227-acre farm at Bulkington, five miles from Devizes, Wiltshire, which came to the market in autumn 2022 with a guide price of £5.75m through Savills in Salisbury. Hunting, shooting and fishing had been a way of life for the farm’s then owner, who loved to catch trout in the mill stream, and, in 1998, converted the charming mill house at the heart of the farm from a red-brick farmhouse into the elegant five-bedroom country house it is today.

Although originally offered for sale as a whole, the best outcome was achieved when, contrary to expectations, the land was bought separately from the house by farming buyers, with The Mill House and its gardens and grounds going to a non-farming purchaser.

According to a report in Farmers Weekly, farmer interest in trading natural capital is in the ascendancy. With substantial grants available from Defra to help farmers prepare Nature projects that will attract private-sector investment, the Environmental Farmers Group (EFG), founded in May 2022, has seen its membership grow swiftly to 268 farmers covering 146,800 hectares (362,000 acres) in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Northamptonshire and north Lincolnshire, with sister cooperatives being formed in Yorkshire and elsewhere. Together, they represent 469 landowners and tenants, all of whom have an interest in delivering for the environment and potentially trading natural capital.

Tom Goodley of Strutt & Parker’s Norwich office reports the sale of the 671-acre Manor Farm at Shropham, near Attleborough, in the Breckland district of south Norfolk, which came to the market in March 2023 with a guide price of £9.5m and was sold as a whole in November to an environmental fund that will continue to farm it with the environment and sustainability in mind. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the novelist Mary Mann, dubbed ‘Norfolk’s Thomas Hardy’, lived at Manor Farm and Shropham was the setting for a collection of short stories known as Tales of Dulditch, in which she describes the harsh reality of farm life during the agricultural depression of the late 19th century.

According to Mr Goodley, Manor Farm was already run on environmentally friendly lines and was entered into a five-year Countryside Stewardship Scheme, which commenced in January 2019, generating more than £90,000 a year and covering capital improvement costs of £88,000. A strong property portfolio includes the Grade II-listed manor house and five other houses, with planning consent for the conversion of redundant barns to residential use.

According to Matt Sudlow, head of farms and estates at Strutt & Parker, the severe lack of farmland for sale in recent years shows signs of abating; he expects to see an increase in supply in 2024. He handled the sale of 327-acre Deanery Farm at Bampton, five miles south-west of Witney, Oxfordshire, which was launched on the market in July 2023 and quickly found a lifestyle buyer who reputedly paid ‘well in excess’ of the £5.15m asking price. For sale due to the retirement of its long-term tenant, Deanery Farm offered a traditional four-bedroom farmhouse with gardens and adjoining land; a pair of semi-detached cottages; a substantial range of traditional and modern farm buildings with scope for alternative uses; and gently undulating farmland with good roadside access.

Country estates for sale in Derbyshire are as rare as hen’s teeth and there was considerable interest when, in December 2020, Barton Hall and its surrounding 168-acre estate at Church Broughton, 11 miles from Ashbourne, was launched onto the market at a guide price of £5.5m through Knight Frank. However, as often happens with historic houses and estates that have been altered over time, there was much legal wrangling over perceived, but generally unquantified ‘risks’, which led some potential purchasers to withdraw from the fray; nevertheless, a deal was successfully completed in February 2023, selling agent Peter Edwards reveals.

The estate centres on Grade II*-listed Barton Hall, which was originally built in the 15th century as a moated, semi-fortified manor house, although significant alterations carried out in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries mean that it now appears as a largely Classical, grand Georgian country house. In 1925, the hall was sold to Basil Mallender, who laid out the Grade II-listed gardens, which he adorned with ironwork sourced from elsewhere in Derbyshire. Ancillary buildings include a courtyard of four cottages, a three-bedroom bungalow with equestrian facilities, a private chapel, outbuildings and garaging.

Down in the South-West, Widworthy Barton House, near Honiton, Devon — a restored Elizabethan country house, the oldest parts of which date from the 13th century — was offered for sale by Strutt & Parker in April 2021 with some 43 acres of gardens and parkland and views over the east Devon countryside, but failed to find a purchaser.

However, following the owner’s inspired decision to include the surrounding 400-odd acres of good arable farmland and pasture, the estate was relaunched on the market in September 2022 and found a buyer with Devon roots who had sold his business and was looking to return to his native county, selling agent Will Whittaker reveals.

Across the county border in north Cornwall, a bitter dispute — dubbed the ‘Battle of Trevalga’ — involving the vendors of the picturesque coastal estate of Trevalga, between Tintagel and Boscastle, and its longstanding tenants, who feared they would be evicted from their homes when it came to the market with a guide price of £16m through Savills in autumn 2022, has ended peacefully with the sale of the estate in October 2023 to Castle Lane Securities, part of the financing and real estate William Pears Group.

Residents of the estate, which comprises six let farms and a further 17 houses and cottages — all now in need of repair — have been reassured by the new owners that everyone involved will be able to remain in their homes.

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September saw the launch onto the market, through Savills National Farms and Estates, of the captivating, 483-acre Markwick residential and farming estate, which sits between the villages of Dunsfold and Hambledon, five miles south of Godalming and nine miles south of the cathedral city of Guildford, within the affluent Surrey Hills AONB.

For sale at a guide price of £8.4 million for the whole, or in three lots, the estate, which enjoys spectacular far-reaching views over rural south Surrey towards the South Downs National Park, was developed over a period of 60-odd years by the late, somewhat eccentric Peter John Rampton, whose family owned the successful catalogue sales company Freemans and lived in Hambledon village.

In the mid 1960s, Rampton bought Burgate farm, which adjoined his parents’ house. He developed and modernised the original pig farm, installing a state-of-the-art piggery with an automated feeder. The farm went from strength to strength and grew into an impressive, still thriving enterprise that is part of an estate-wide commercial farming operation currently run under an Farm Business Tenancy until September 2027.

Farming rekindled Rampton’s interest in steam-powered machinery and engineering, and inspired his other lifelong passion, his vast collection of narrow-gauge railway locomotives and carriages sourced from all over the world, which he repaired and restored at the farm. An intriguing relic remains at Gorebridge Green Farm buildings (part of lot 2), where a disused narrow-gauge railway line was designed to link to the main house, but never finished.

In 1968, Rampton acquired the adjoining farm, which included an early-16th-century Surrey hall house with 17th-century extensions and 19th- and 20th-century additions at either end. The timber-frame house had been damaged by two fires and was partly restored over many years, using timber from the farm, and skills and techniques employed in its original construction.

Lot 1, on offer at a guide price of £2.25m, comprises the partly renovated, 16th-century Markwick Farmhouse, which stands on high ground surrounded by lawned gardens and 27 acres of arable and pasture land overlooking the fields and woodland of Burgate Farm. The house provides 3,436sq ft of accommodation including three reception rooms, two unfinished bedroom suites, and a single-storey, two-bedroom annexe that could be incorporated within the main living space or used as separate accommodation.

Across the courtyard from the main house stands Markwick Barn, a substantial stone and timber-framed barn previously used to store classic cars, which has evident potential for conversion to additional accommodation.

Lot 2, priced at £5.75m, comprises the 412-acre Burgate Farm, a well-equipped mainly arable farm with 188 acres of mixed coniferous and broadleaved woodland. A charming, brick-and-flint, three-bedroom farmhouse is located centrally among the farmland and woodland, accessed from a private road that runs from east to west across the farm.

Originally built as two cottages, the house has been knocked through to provide more than 1,670sq ft of accommodation. The farm buildings include a new grain store and grain dryer, as well as former livestock buildings. Lot 3, priced at £400,000, is a block of 40 acres of bare arable land let until September 2027.

The Markwick Estate is for sale at a guide price of £8.4 million for the whole, but can be split in to lots — see more details and pictures.

Credit: Knight Frank

A magical turreted mansion with incredible sea views for sale on the Isle of Wight

Credit: Stags

A former racing yard in Somerset that's a beautiful country home — and ideal for horse lovers

Set in the Quantock Hills, this charming equestrian farm boasts modern accommodation with panoramic vistas and pretty extensive riding facilities

19 breathtaking houses, as seen in the pages of Country Life

Our weekly round-up of beautiful properties goes from Cornwall to County Durham and Pembrokeshire to Perthshire.

Those dreaming of an idyllic life in the Emerald Isle will be thrilled to see a wonderful property which has come up for sale in Co Tipperary’s Golden Vale: the thriving, 751-acre Barne estate, on the market at €13.5m (£11.8m).

For those keen on the main house but not looking for such a large swathe of land, the property is also being offered in a series of lots. And at the very heart is Barne House and surrounds, designated as Lot 1 with a guide price of €2.5m, which comprises the imposing, south-facing, principal estate house set in 105 acres.

The land includes formal gardens, parkland, pasture and woodland, which enjoys panoramic views across its own lake and rolling farmland towards the Knockmealdown Mountains on the horizon.

The mansion house itself is built on three storeys around a historic courtyard, and dates from the 17th century.

It was extended in about 1870 with the addition of a château-style roof and a dormer attic storey.

It now offers 16,900sq ft of living space on four floors, including four main reception rooms, 12 bedrooms and extensive secondary accommodation.

A guide of €9m is quoted for Lot 2, comprising some 552 acres of ring-fenced arable farmland, pasture and mature woodland, with frontage to three public roads. Lot 3, priced at €1.55m, is a single block of 94 acres of mainly arable land to the north-west of the estate, with shed storage for 1,000 tons of grain.

Lot 4, on offer at €300,000, is the four-bedroom Monkstown House, a two-storey detached house of traditional construction set in a pretty, half-acre garden, with its own private entrance off the main N24.

Owned by the same family for more than 350 years, the pristine Barne estate near Clonmel, was established in the mid 1600s by Richard Moore, a glover from Barnstaple, Devon, who made his fortune as a land agent and sheep farmer in the rich farming land of south-east Tipperary.

Political appointments and financial favours from the Crown made him a potent force in local politics, and, at his death, his landholdings included Barne, Chancellorstown and Hoare Abbey in Tipperary, as well as Moore Hill and Kilworth in Co Cork.

Barne lies in an area of rich limestone land that is home to one of the world’s most iconic stud farms, and is currently run as a thriving, 600-acre arable enterprise by Richard Thomson-Moore, a graduate of the Royal Agricultural University, Cirencester, who took over the running of the estate following his father’s sudden death in 2015. Tipperary agents REA Stokes & Quirke are joint agents with Savills in the sale of the estate.

The Barne Estate is for sale at €13.5 million — see more pictures and details.

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Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Is it a Georgian mansion? A castle? A waterside home on a secluded island? The 142-acre Cuskinny House estate is a little of all three, a beautiful Irish estate on Great Island, the largest of several islands in Cork Harbour, one of the world’s great natural harbours. Rupert Sweeting of Knight Frank’s country department and Michael Daniels of Michael H. Daniels & Co in Fermoy are handling the sale at a guide price of €4m (£3.45m).

The estate occupies a magnificent position on Cuskinny Bay, a small horseshoe bay overlooking the harbour. The focal point of the estate is Cuskinny House, a handsome, late-Georgian country house built around a Norman castle-keep that once stood guard over the approaches to the inner harbour and Cork city itself.

It is approached along a sweeping tree-lined drive that leads along the water’s edge to a large gravel forecourt, with lawns, framed by mature trees, running more than 300ft to the foreshore.

The location could scarcely be more idyllic, but it's not all roses at Cuskinny House as the pictures show: this is a great house now in need of some TLC.

Surrounded by 22 acres of gardens and pleasure grounds, Cuskinny House offers 10,720sq ft of pleasantly rambling, light-filled accommodation including a reception hall, four reception rooms, six bedrooms and three bathrooms, with staff quarters and two self-contained apartments located in the East Wing.

Now in need of modernisation following the death last year of Wanda Ronan, at the age of 101, the present house was built in about 1837 for Savage French by Cork architect Henry Hill, based on drawings scaled down from an earlier, heavy Victorian Gothic design by J. & G. R. Pain.

According to research carried out by Galway University, the French family of Co Cork descend from Richard French of Cork, who died in 1651. By the mid 18th century, Savage French lived at Marino, Great Island, and Savage French of Cuskinny was his grandson. At the time of Griffith’s Valuation (1847–64), Sampson Twogood French of Queenstown owned more than 5,300 acres in Co Cork.

According to Mrs Ronan’s son and executor, Simon Ronan, it was he who built the sea wall at Cuskinny in 1820.

He further reveals that the French family originally rented both the Marino and Cuskinny estates from the Ronan/Ronayne families before eventually buying them outright.

Cuskinny House in Co Cork is for sale at €4m — see more details and pictures.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

More than 500 years of mixed fortunes are encapsulated in a historic Irish estate that has come to the market: the picturesque, 448-acre Belle Isle estate overlooking Lough Erne in Co Fermanagh. James Butler of Savills in Dublin is handling the sale, quoting a guide price of £7.5 million.

The 15,524sq ft castle — listed Grade B+ — has been, for the last 25 years or so, set up as luxury holiday accommodation, comprising four well-proportioned reception rooms, two kitchens and 13 bedroom suites. The Victorian farmyard has been converted into eight courtyard apartments, while two semi-detached coach houses are used as short-term holiday rentals.

In total the let accommodation throughout the estate currently sleeps up to 65 guests, and the topography and woods form the basis of a renowned and exciting wild-bird shoot. The estate also boasts some 6½ miles of frontage on Lough Erne, with fishing and water sports available on the lake and four private islands.

Things weren't always so peaceful. Following the Flight of the Earls in September 1607, when the Gaelic Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell set sail from Donegal to seek Spanish support in their long-running conflict with the English Crown, James I declared the estates of the refugee earls forfeit and intensified the colonisation of Ulster with a new Protestant population drawn from England and Scotland.

One of many beneficiaries of this process was Paul Gore, an Elizabethan soldier of fortune, who, in 1611, in addition to the 29,000-acre Manor Gore estate in Co Donegal, was granted 1,000 acres in Co Fermanagh, including Ballymacmanus Island on Lough Erne, the home of the Macmanus clan since medieval times. Gore was created a Baronet in 1621.

In about 1718, the 4th Baronet, Sir Ralph Gore, built himself a relatively modest Georgian house as the centrepiece of an ambitious planned landscape, and renamed the island Belle Isle. His son, also Sir Ralph, built Belle Isle Castle around the original Georgian house and significantly expanded the estate.

In 1746, another Sir Ralph, 6th Baronet, inherited Belle Isle. Successful careers, both as a soldier and an Irish parliamentarian, saw him elevated through the Irish peerage as Baron Gore of Manor Gore, Viscount Belleisle, and, finally, 1st (and last) Earl of Ross. He spent lavishly on the estate, creating follies and walks around the island and indulging his passion for racehorses and taste for fast living.

By the time he died, probably in 1802, he had squandered his entire patrimony, leaving what remained with £14,000 of debt. Belle Isle then passed to his only surviving child, Lady Mary Hardinge.

She left Belle Isle to her nephew, the Revd Sir Charles Hardinge, who, in 1830, sold what remained of ‘the ruined seat of the Earl of Ross’ to the Revd John Grey Porter, after which it remained with successive generations of the Porter family.

They restored the house and land and built a new stable court. The design of the main house, with its tower and gabled gallery extension, is attributed to London-based architect Percy Richard Morley Horder.

The last of the Porter line to own Belle Isle was Miss Lavinia Baird, who, in 1991, sold it to the Duke of Abercorn. An extensive renovation programme began with the conversion of the Hamilton Wing in 1992.

Belle Isle Estate is for sale at £7.5 million — see more details and pictures.

Located on the north Norfolk coast between the fishing port of Wells-next-the-Sea and the sailing centre of Burnham Overy Staithe, the tiny village of Holkham was once a landing with access to the sea via a tidal creek to the harbour at Wells. Following the arrival of the pioneering Coke family in the early 1700s, the land around the creek was gradually reclaimed from the sea to form part of the now 25,000-acre Holkham estate, a thriving farming, tourism and property business, the avowed aim of which is to be ‘the UK’s most pioneering and sustainable rural estate’.

Holkham houses for sale are as rare as hen’s teeth, as the £3 million price-tag that accompanies the launch onto the market of Georgian, Grade II-listed The White House at Warham, three miles south of Wells, clearly indicates. Ben Marchbank of Bedfords in Burnham Market is handling the sale.

The White House stands in just over three acres of immaculate gardens and woodland, ‘off the beaten track’ in the ancient village of Warham, which boasts two medieval churches and the excellent Three Horseshoes pub, within the North Norfolk AONB. The house has retained its essential Georgian character, with fine sash windows, marble fire surrounds, an elegant main staircase and well-proportioned rooms, although the present owners have cleverly adapted the interior to create a spacious kitchen/family room and an additional bedroom.

In all, The White House offers 5,733sq ft of light-filled accommodation, including five reception rooms, five bedrooms, three bathrooms and a two-bedroom guest wing, the whole beautifully decorated in classic Heritage colours. Outbuildings include the original coach house and stable and a four-bay garage. There is also a heated outdoor swimming pool.

According to its Historic England listing, The White House dates from about 1750 and possesses a distinctive Dutch gable built of flint behind a later Georgian façade ‘typical of a Holkham estate gentleman farmer’s house’, which was added in about 1800 to a design by Samuel Wyatt, who oversaw the building of the estate’s Grade II*-listed Great Barn and other farm buildings.

Holkham has long been renowned for the quality of its buildings and, with 300 residential properties scattered around the estate, there is fierce competition for houses that become available for sale or rent, although the estate has a policy of not renting to people who plan to use the property as a second home.

The beating heart of the estate is Grade I-listed Holkham Hall, a grand Palladian mansion built for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, between 1734 and 1735, and now the home of the 8th Earl, who has inherited the Coke family’s passion for conservation, farming, forestry and gamekeeping, with the maintenance of the estate’s diverse landscape of farmland, woodland, parkland, saltmarsh and coastline. It includes the 9,600-acre Holkham National Nature Reserve, which is managed jointly with Natural England. It all makes for an idyllic coastal landscape that has been described as ‘a balm for the soul’.

The White House in Warham is for sale at £3m — see more details and pictures.

Holkham Hall: 'there are few places a modern visitor can get so close to the realities of life on the grand scale in 18th-century Britain'

John Goodall revisits the splendours of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, a celebrated house — and the seat of the Earl

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

A farmer's-eye view of Holkham, the ultimate example of profitable food production and wildlife conservation going hand in hand

Jamie Blackett leaves his Dumfriesshire farm to visit Holkham, and comes away impressed and inspired.

Camilla Elwell of Savills country department is overseeing the sale, at a guide price of £4.25m, of one of Wiltshire’s most delightful historic manor houses, the Grade II*-listed Baverstock Manor, which sits in 18 acres of gardens, grounds and paddocks in the tiny hamlet of Baverstock, a mile east of the village of Dinton and seven miles west of Salisbury, within the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs AONB.

Local records reveal that, in 968, King Edgar of Mercia donated 300 acres of land at Baverstock to nearby Wilton Abbey. The original house at Baverstock was built in the 1500s by the Abbess of Wilton as a retreat house, which later became the Manor.

It stands on the site of the medieval Mary’s Well, a holy well reputed to cure diseases of the eye that attracted many pilgrims to Baverstock. The well was fed by three springs, two under the house and one across the lane, which overflowed into the winterbourne east of the house and thence to the River Nadder, as they do to this day.

According to its listing, the picturesque Tudor house, built mainly of dressed sandstone under a tiled roof, was significantly enlarged in the 17th century, when it passed to the Penruddocke family of Compton Chamberlayne, and was restored by Mrs Benett-Stanford of nearby Pythouse in the 1930s.

It retains a wealth of period features, including stone mullioned windows and handsome stone fireplaces.

Owned by the same family for the past 80-odd years, and now in need of updating, Baverstock Manor offers some 6,000sq ft of accommodation on two main floors, including an entrance hall, four reception rooms, a study, studio, flower room and kitchen/breakfast room on the ground floor.

There is a large principal bedroom suite, eight further bedrooms and three bathrooms on the first floor. Included in the sale are a pretty, three-bedroom stone cottage, stone outbuildings, a stable yard and barn and amenities including a swimming pool and tennis court.

Baverstock Manor is for sale at £4.25m — see more pictures and details.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Abbots Sharpham estate dates back to the Bronze Age and was bequeathed to the Abbots of Glastonbury in 1191 by King John. Encompassing 270 acres of deer park, cider orchards, an organic farm, numerous cottages and a mill, the estate is being offered as a whole for £8 million, or in four separate lots, via Carter Jonas.

At the heart of the estate is a manor house, built in 1512 by Abbot Bere, the Papal legate of Henry Tudor (VII). Over the centuries the house has passed through Dukes, poets, wealthy cattle dealers, a renowned geologist and palaeontologist, and, most recently, Roget Saul, the founder of British fashion house, Mulberry.

Roger Saul and his wife bought Abbots Sharpham in 1977 and have carefully restored the house, garden and parkland over the 46 years they’ve been at the property, having acquired more of the estate throughout their ownership.

A great deal of effort has gone into preserving and improving the estate and its landscape. In 1993, 4000 English hardwood trees were planted, and in 2003, the farmland was restored and made organic, the deer park created and miles of walnut and fruit orchards planted.

The spelt mill was built in 2007 with offices and a warehouse, meaning that today, the estate not only offers an incredible family home, but ‘a productive, organic mixed economy farm.’

The Grade II listed manor house is a treasure trove of historic features, showcasing its evolution over the years.

Externally, it’s formed of Blue Lias and Doulting stonework under terracotta pantile roofs. Inside, flagstone flooring; timberwork in oak, elm and pine; stone mullioned windows and carved armorial freestone panels take centre stage — including one of the few remaining coats of arms of Glastonbury, according to the agents.

The historic significance of this house is apparent from the outset. The entrance door, after all, is a thick oak door with elaborate medieval hinges which opens up to an utterly charming entrance hall, where flagstone floors and honey-coloured plaster walls lead to the extensive ground floor accommodation, comprising of six reception rooms, an orangery, gun room and farmhouse style kitchen with marble and mahogany worktops.

There are eight bedrooms in total, some with views over Glastonbury Tor.

As will be apparent by now. A huge amount of work and effort has gone into the gardens and surrounding grounds at Abbots Sharpham, which is evident to see. Each space uncovers a different delight — from the wisteria-clad pergola, to the playing card garden and croquet lawn, to the 17^th century ‘six eye waggon house’ with a pizza oven and kitchen, and not overlooking the magnificent indoor swimming pool, as well as an all-weather tennis court.

This estate really is somewhere you can retreat to and completely shut off from the outside world.

Elsewhere on the land is a series of stone garages with electric charge points and stables. There’s also a large stone building, built in 1701, currently used as storage but with full planning permissions for residential use. There are also timber stables and a range of cattle and sheep sheds.

It doesn’t stop there. Two, three-bed cottages are also included in the sale, as is the spelt mill, a series of farm buildings and offices, a carp pond and summerhouse, as well as the productive walnut and mixed fruit orchards and a field of solar panels. Whew.

And if that all wasn’t enough, you’ll never have to worry about where to pitch your tent at Glastonbury — just pop home.

Abbots Sharpham is currently on the market via Carter Jonas with a guide price of £8 million — see more pictures or enquire with the agent for further details.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

At the end of a sweeping rhododendron-lined driveway, you will find the imposing manor house that is Brynwern Hall.

With 16 acres of gardens and pastureland, the property — now on the market via Savills with a guide price of £1.45 million — also benefits from some 5,300sq ft of living space over two floors, which translates to six bedrooms and plenty of room for entertaining.

A traditional home, the property was built in 1886 to designs from architect Clifton Rees Mogg. The reception rooms on the ground floor, particularly, benefit from large windows, high ceilings and tremendous amounts of natural light.

Also included in the sale is a sweet, semi-detached cottage, known as Orchard Cottage, offering three bedrooms and lovely living accommodation with French doors that open up to the gardens and patio area.

The gardens and grounds are extensive and a real focal point of the property. There are plenty of lawned areas, woodland and pasture, and the River Wye is less than half a mile away, well within walking distance.

Formal gardens extend from the south terrace and wrap around the house with a double Ha Ha. This, in turn, blends into woodland, within which are three paths, framed by Rhododendrons, Oak trees, Yew and Ash, that lead to the rear driveway, the cottage and pasture.

The Brecon Beacons and Eppynt Mountains are within an hour’s drive and the popular spa town of Builth Wells is six miles to the south.

Brynwern Hall is currently on the market via Savills with a guide price of £1.45 million — see more pictures or enquire with the agent for further details.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Bounded by Shropshire to the north, Worcestershire to the east, Gloucestershire to the southeast, and the Welsh counties of Monmouthshire and Powys to the west, dreamy, landlocked Herefordshire, best known for its fruit, cider and cattle, is one of the smallest, least-populated and most rural counties in England.

Having tested the water at the height of the pandemic, Will Matthews of Knight Frank and Crispin Holborow of Savills are overseeing the relaunch onto the market of the pristine, 266-acre Poston Court estate at Vowchurch, nine miles from Hay-on-Wye and 11 miles from Hereford, at a guide price of £9.55 million.

The focal point of the estate is Grade II*-listed Poston House, which stands on the site of a medieval deer park high in the western hills, looking out over the glorious Golden Valley to the Black Mountains and the Forest of Dean.

The original Georgian house was designed in 1765 by the architect Sir William Chambers, of Kew Gardens fame, as a shooting lodge for Sir Edward Boughton, whose father bought the manor of Poston from the 5th Duke of Beaufort’s trustees in 1749.

In the late 1800s, the house was altered and extended, with the addition of east and west wings. The estate grounds were laid out by Sir Thomas Robinson, who was master gardener to George III, and many of the magnificent trees seen at Poston today were planted at that time.

In the 1960s, the estate was sold to a local farmer, after which the ‘very charming shooting box’ mentioned in Pevsner went into rapid decline. By 1988, when Esmond and Susie Bulmer bought the Poston estate, the house was a virtual ruin, its classic late-18th-century rotunda a nesting place for hens.

A 2005 article by Mary Miers in Country Life (July 7, 2005) traces the transformation of Poston House from a forlorn wreck to an ‘arresting country house on a diminutive scale’, thanks to an inspired collaboration between the Bulmers, the architect Philip Jebb and master-builders Treasure & Son of Ludlow.

The remodelling of Poston House involved the restoration of the 18th-century core, comprising the south-facing round room, the hall, the staircase and the Doric portico, and the replacement of the Victorian wings by two-storey pavilions in keeping with the original Chambers design.

The former gate lodge, used as a farmhouse in Victorian times, was turned into a guest annexe, with buildings in the farm courtyard later converted into an office, a gardener’s cottage and garaging.

During their tenure, the present owners — who bought Poston Court in 2015 — have, according the agents, transformed ‘a timeless classical house into a modern masterpiece’, thanks to an extensive and minutely detailed programme of renovation, repair and/or rebuilding of the entire house, orangery and pool house, lodge, cottages and estate buildings, all carried out by a dedicated team of specialist craftsmen.

The main house offers 4,362sq ft of glamorous and colourful accommodation including an elegant drawing room, a comfortable library, a Chambers circular dining room, a bespoke Martin Moore kitchen and three bedroom suites, with a further three bedroom suites in Poston Lodge, and four further bedrooms in Poston Cottage.

The Poston Court Estate is for sale via Savills and Knight Frank — see more pictures and details. 

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Travelling the Wye Valley: Castles, books and 'a secret place only Herefordians know'

Eulogised by Gilpin, Wordsworth and Coleridge and immortalised on canvas by Turner, the sylvan charm of the River Wye Valley

Hampshire — £3,850,000

An attractive Grade II listed, Queen Anne farmhouse with a courtyard of traditional and modern farm buildings.

There are eight bedrooms in total and over 132 acres of land included in the sale.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Buckinghamshire — £1,250,000

A pretty, thatched Grade II-listed five-bedroom cottage in a village location.

Built in the mid-to-late 18th century, the present owners have redecorated and update the house sympathetically, including a partial re-thatching of the roof.

For sale with Michael Graham. See more pictures and details for this property.

Buckinghamshire — £3,950,000

Just under 16 acres of land at this eight-bedroom family home in the Chilterns, just five miles from High Wycombe — from where London is under half an hour.

There is also a full leisure complex, with 14m swimming pool.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Surrey — £5,000,000

A remarkable opportunity to build a new, classically designed mansion in excess of 22,000 sqft, set in 5 acres of parkland adjacent to Windsor Great Park.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Surrey — £7,000,000

An estate just outside Ripley, within easy reach of Woking, Guildford and both A3 and M25, up for sale in lots — with lot 1, at £7m, including the main house and 47 acres. A further 70 acres is available.

The house has Tudor origins but the site is even older, and some of the oaks on the estate are believed to be 600 years old.

For sale with Strutt & Parker. See more pictures and details for this property.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

There is a certain irony about St George’s Hill, that 964-acre swathe of land in Weybridge, north Surrey. Some 100 years after it was transformed into one of the country’s first private estates by Walter George Tarrant in 1911, it is arguably one of the most exclusive addresses in the nation. One wonders if Tarrant knew that, back in April 1649, it was the site of a ‘Digger’ colony, now recognised as one of the first small-scale experiments of socialism in the world.

What Tarrant certainly did know was that the burgeoning middle classes of Edwardian England would soon be drawn to this picturesque part of the Home Counties, take advantage of its beauty and utilise the technological advances of transportation to become some of the first suburbanites to enjoy the pleasures of rural living with the ease of access to central London.

It’s a rich tradition that continues to this day, as Stuart Cole, a partner in Knight Frank’s country department, points out. ‘The area is great,’ he says. ‘You’re close to the airports, you’re close to an amazing array of private schools and London is just up the road — on the right day, it’s 45 minutes to drive to Harrods.’

These private estates, to which you can add Wentworth, Burwood Park and Ashley Park, among others, were created for the ‘upper-middle classes, that needed to work every day and get into London, but still wanted a big country house,’ adds Simon Ashwell, Savills’s regional director for Surrey and east Berkshire.

After buying and building St George’s Hill, Tarrant wasn’t finished, acquiring the development rights to Wentworth in 1922. Much like St George’s Hill, Wentworth, in Virginia Water, was to be private and centred around a golf course designed and built by Harry Colt. As much as he was an entrepreneur catering to the nation’s new elites, so, too, was Tarrant a builder and many of the Arts-and-Crafts homes he built across both estates are still standing (and, indeed, very desirable) to this day.

One such example that is currently on the market is the sublime Yaffle Hill, which stands within and above the glorious St George's Hill estate. Set over three floors, with seven bedrooms and 1.5 acres of landscaped gardens — as well as a separate three-bedroom coach house — this wing of the original Tarrant house is one of the finest properties on this illustrious estate.

A true beauty of the Arts-and-Crafts style, Yaffle Hill retains its early-20th-century charm both inside and out, while also providing all the comforts expected on this exclusive estate. Come for the mullioned and transomed windows, stay for the glorious interiors. For sale with Savills for £5.25 million.

That being said, the key to Surrey’s estates was, and still is, the land. ‘On both estates, the land holds more value than the bricks and mortar themselves,’ says Tom Shuttleworth, senior associate director at Strutt & Parker’s national country-house department. ‘Buyers typically prioritise modern design and technology, so it’s not unusual to see a house that was built 10 years ago be knocked down and rebuilt.

'The original houses that remain are highly sought after. They typically sit on larger plots of 10 acres or so — compared with newer houses that often have an acre or two — and they therefore offer a lot of potential to a buyer.’

Mr Shuttleworth’s comments are echoed by Mr Cole, who says that ‘there is currently a big run of people who haven’t found exactly what home they want, so they buy plots and build what they want’. Although building the ‘dream home’ is a lure for potential buyers, any development must be carried out sensitively, with many estates having strict covenants on plot sizes and home sizes. St George’s Hill is a prime example.

‘It is the only private estate in the UK where a Government white paper has been passed on the terms of planning, meaning that any prospective buyer knows exactly what they can and cannot build on the land,’ comments Tim Firth, director of Jackson-Stops Weybridge. ‘As part of this covenant, the minimum land able to be purchased is one acre; however, purchasers can only build on 20% of the landholding, in order to preserve the estate’s spacious and serene feel.’

‘Really, it’s about protecting the environment,’ adds Mr Ashwell. ‘The covenant means you can’t put up a block of flats, so the environment is maintained and your plot is protected.’

These estates are ‘private’, so, of course, privacy is also a big draw for potential residents — the list of celebrities who own or owned properties on these estates is far too long to list here. But it would be wrong to not at least mention a few names of current and former residents, not least for the fun of writing a sentence which includes Ringo Starr, the Sultan of Brunei, Bruce Forsyth and Augusto Pinochet.

Modern buyers no longer include the middle classes: this is now the domain of high-net-worth individuals from both the UK and around the world, and privacy is more important than ever.

‘It’s a place where they can safely have their family and children, it’s secure, there are facilities and when you are travelling you don’t have to worry about your family,’ says Mr Cole. ‘It’s a global thing — you get different nationalities at different times, but now it’s the Chinese, people from the Middle East, Brits and Americans. It’s a really good blend.’

Mr Shuttleworth points out that ‘unless you have your own private security, you’re unlikely to find a “safer” place to buy a home’. The UK’s exceptional private schools are also a driver for international buyers — ‘more recently, there has been an increase in demand from Chinese buyers who want to educate their children in England and we have an extensive choice of the best private school options nearby, as well as several international schools,’ says Martin Burrow, associate director for prime country sales at Hamptons.

As much as security is an attraction, so, too, is the lifestyle on offer at Surrey’s estates. Golf is extremely popular and, at St George’s Hill and Wentworth, you will find two of the finest courses in the country.

‘In Wentworth, if you live on the main island, you can step out of the house with your golf clubs and be on the course in seconds,’ says Mr Shuttleworth.

‘The clubhouse is the heart of the estate and, as a resident, you’re likely to spend a lot of time there — dining and drinking, socialising, exercising or in the spa. The estates are notably incredibly quiet, which is increasingly rare — no road traffic or train noise and no school noise when they finish for the day.’

As Mr Shuttleworth suggests, life on these estates is as much about the company you keep as the home you live in. And Mr Cole adds that ‘it’s a community of people who are used to mixing internationally’.

‘Private estates aren’t anything out of the ordinary, they are simply a slightly more controlled style of housing,’ concludes Mr Ashwell. ‘They are quiet, you can control what you can and can’t build and they are greener.’

Are there any downsides to private-estate living? ‘There used to be more empty houses, as people would buy and then not occupy,’ says Mr Cole. ‘There was anxiety around whether they would become ghost towns, but it doesn’t happen much any more, as covid has made more people realise that they enjoy spending time at these estates.’

With privacy, security, Nature and everything else, it’s not surprising to discover that there is a premium on estate living (‘about 40%–50% compared with the local area,’ according to Mr Shuttleworth). But, as Mr Firth says, ‘living here is the pinnacle of prime country real estate and the true scarcity of when a property does come up for sale means it will always find a buyer fast’.

Oxfordshire — £9.5m

The Ewelme Estate is for sale, including — at the heart of it — a Lutyens-style Country House set in outstanding gardens overlooking the Chilterns Escarpment.

The £9.5m covers 'only' the main house and 106 acres - a further 500-odd are available for those able to double that budget.

For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details for this property.

Bedfordshire — £3.25m

Over 8,000 sq ft of space at this superb country house accessed via gates that give a real sense of occasion to coming home, even if you've only popped down to the shops (or the local pub, which is in walking distance).

Seven bedrooms and seven reception rooms in the main house, which dates to the turn of the 18th century and sits in 14 acres of land.

For sale with Michael Graham. See more pictures and details for this property.

Cornwall — £5m

What can we say? There are only four bedrooms, and the house barely surpasses 2,000sq ft even including the storage in the eaves. But as the old saying goes, location, location, location: it's a gorgeous house in a perfect spot on a stretch of land, Greenaway, immortalised by John Betjeman.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details for this property.

Kent — £2.5m

The estate dates back 1,200 years — though the house itself is a mere baby, at around 450 — at Charlton Place, just six miles from Canterbury.

There's an amazing amount of history, from its usage in wartime and likely visits by Jane Austen to its years as a Dr Barnardo's home. Work to be done, but this is a magnificent place that deserves every penny that will be spent.

For sale with Strutt & Parker. See more pictures and details for this property.

Cornwall — £4m

An an exceptional beachside house' on Constatine Bay, north Cornwall, that's grandly designed and brilliantly thought out within.

Huge glass walls make the most of exquisite views, the beach is but a short stroll and there's even a plug-in point to charge up your Tesla.

For sale with Lillicrap Chilcott. See more pictures and details for this property.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

The important debate about new housing — how much is needed, where to build it and how to design it — continues to rage. Discussion of the issue, however, commonly generates more heat than light, with politicians, developers and local communities often making irreconcilable demands of each other. It doesn’t help, either, that coverage is usually framed in national terms, so the points of note in specific projects easily lose focus.

More helpful, therefore, is to try and look at the experience of a single county: Dorset. It’s the more interesting because it is here that one of the most debated of all recent developments that tried to break the mould — Poundbury, begun in 1993 — is now nearing completion.

The earliest phase of Poundbury (Fig 1), on the undistinguished western edge of Dorchester, is generally low rise, rarely more than two storeys, perhaps more villagey than urban. As the development has advanced uphill, it has become progressively more ambitious, with many taller buildings in Regency urban idioms — some of the terraces and groupings being reminiscent of Cheltenham — until the visitor arrives at the grandiose civic focus, the predominantly Palladian Queen Mother Square. Many Modernist architects and critics have sneered at Poundbury, but it would appear to have set a positive example to at least some of the county’s small builders and developers. They have drawn profitable lessons from it about how to deploy local materials and vernaculars and how to juxtapose components to achieve seemingly unselfconscious groupings of buildings in a wider development.

If matters of plan, scale, materials and idiom are part of the varied Poundbury legacy for Dorset, another is the role that public-spirited landowners can contribute to successful outcomes. That’s because The King, then Prince of Wales, challenged The Prince’s Foundation to engage more landowners and the associated professionals, developers and builders in creating attractive mixed-use, mixed-income, walkable communities. This led, in 2016, to the publication of Building a Legacy: A Landowner’s Guide to Popular Development, a prospectus that sets out a model of development aimed at creating social and economic value over the long term.

Across the country at large there are signal examples of large landowners who are not only able — in a way that smaller ones rarely can — to take a long-term view of development on their land, but who also see it as part of what might be called their public duty to facilitate such an approach; the Earl of Moray at Tornagrain in Scotland, the Bowood estate at Calne in Wiltshire and Sir Tim Knatchbull at Romsey in Hampshire, to name only three.

An important element of the national debate over development has been the controversy over top-down targets: quotas decided at Whitehall level and imposed on local authorities. The latter, in turn, feel obliged to sanction applications that will enable them to meet those targets, irrespective of whether the housing is actually what is needed in a particular area or, equally to the point, whether it is well designed and visually appropriate. Dorset Council’s current preferred approach to meeting Whitehall targets (which, until recently, were 30,000, excluding the Bournemouth and Poole area) is to have a few large developments attached to existing towns, such as Sherborne (Fig 4), Gillingham, Bridport and Shaftesbury. Largest of all, and the most contentious, would be ‘North Dorchester’, a proposed development of potentially 4,000 houses on the hitherto open chalk slopes to the north of the county town.

Although this approach can have advantages when properly designed (as at Poundbury) and obviously simplifies work for the planning department by minimising the number of applications, there is also a real need to add much more modest developments to villages that meet the certifiable and quantifiable need of local people. It is a recurrent complaint in attractive rural districts — and not only in Dorset — that every time a house comes on the market it is snapped up by buyers from outside the county and young locals cannot get a look in. One potential solution being actively investigated in the county is the concept of the community land trust, which offers the chance to restrict new housing to those who can demonstrate their local credentials — the first challenge being to find the necessary land at affordable prices.

A top-down approach to housing targets also brings with it an aesthetic problem. In the UK today, the 10 biggest house-building companies now account for almost two-thirds of what is built, whereas a declining proportion — one-tenth — is accounted for by the small firms that build fewer than 100 houses per annum. An inevitable consequence of this is that local firms, which are well versed in local idioms and materials, cannot match what the larger developers offer landowners for their land. They are, therefore, being progressively squeezed out of the market. Large developers, however, are interested in economies of scale to generate their profit margins — reputed in one case to be an astonishing 30%. That involves building houses to generic designs.

In Dorset, the point is made by comparing two relatively recent developments added to Sherborne on land released by the principal local landowner, Sherborne Castle Estates. On the one hand there is Fosters Fields, quite a large development of 120 houses that dates from the early 2000s. This is the work of the county’s most significant local builder/developer, CG Fry (Fig 5). The layout is intricate and varied, as is the architecture. This is all in what would be called ‘traditional’ styles and materials, and ranges from Regency-inspired, three-storey, brick-and-render terraces to the characteristic Poundbury/Fry mix of smaller, two-storey groupings in different materials (Fig 9).

At the other edge of the town is a much more recent development of some 330 houses by a large national developer, Persimmon. Some would claim that it’s a subjective judgement, but this strikes me as a classic example of a large-developer scheme primarily driven by a policy of maximising profits and minimising design effort: poor layout and grouping of houses, with far too many shoe-horned onto the site, little attention to local materials, idiom and parking arrangements. Helpful design suggestions of building forms and local materials in the admirable planning brief of 2007 drawn up by the now-defunct West Dorset Council, being merely ‘advisory’, were seemingly disregarded. Nor is there any of the infrastructure one would expect from such a large development, including the shop and community hall specified by the planning brief.

As a firm, CG Fry has been long involved at Poundbury and has overseen some of the most successful additions to the county’s housing stock of recent decades (Fig 5). As in Sherborne, these are characterised by a mixture of traditional idioms, inspired by vernacular, Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian, carried out in a blend of brick, stone, render and flint, with roofs of tile, slate or thatch.

Good examples of the company’s work include 60 houses at West Allington on the western approach to Bridport, where the entrance off the main road is framed on one side by a thatched group with bands of flint and brick; on the other by a group in golden local stone. At Malthouse Meadow, Portesham, the mix of materials (silvery stone and brick) reflects the location a few miles inland from the coast at Chesil Beach. Executed in two phases, it includes a doctor’s surgery and affordable homes. The firm has also worked in a more urban idiom, as currently in the case of Chickerell, on the approach to the unlovely suburbs of Weymouth.

Meanwhile, in Abbotsbury, essentially an Ilchester estate village, a study of 1973 carried out for the estate by the Bath firm of William Bertram & Fell generated three small develoments that Michael Hill in the revised Dorset volume of The Buildings of England (2018) refers to as ‘exemplary’. One is a group of stepped thatched cottages by Clive Hawkins, which fits into the existing villagescape so smoothly that one barely notices it; the others are by Bertram & Fell and CG Fry, the latter with 28 homes, of which 20 are ‘affordable’.

Small Dorset schemes, slotted into towns and villages (Fig 6), show other architects/developers making predominantly positive contributions. In Sherborne, St Antony’s Square (Fig 2), designed with input from the late Anthony Jaggard, is a diminutive development of houses attractively varied in shape, predominantly stuccoed with Hamstone dressings under tiled roofs with dormers and grouped informally behind the Catholic church. It is now showing its age only in the sense that the integral garages are too small for the inflated average size of cars, which consequently get parked outside. Another small, but sensitive village scheme is the Coach House development in Fontmell Magna (Fig 7), a main-road village between Blandford Forum and Shaftesbury, designed by Peter Thompson Architects in 2005 and using the combination of brick and flint appropriate to a chalk area.

Wyatt Homes, one of the larger developers in the region, has a number of schemes in the county. At one of these, in Shillingstone, a striking Voysey-esque tower house at the entrance to the scheme (taking a cue from Poundbury) catches the eye from the village street, as does a pair of tall thatched houses further in (Fig 8); but, overall, there is perhaps too much variety of materials and styles and too much dark woodwork.

The scheme is also let down by a common problem even in some well-intentioned developments: the windows and doors are too often straight out of a catalogue and, on not-too-distant inspection, made of PVC. The Old Dairy in Child Okeford, an otherwise pleasant scheme by Parsons & Joyce in a neo-Victorian vein, is another example of a development spoilt aesthetically by plastic windows. In fairness, these features have sometimes been introduced by owners or occupants after the original build.

Another strictly aesthetic problem in some new developments is the absence of chimneys. The phasing out of gas boilers in the years ahead means that the chimneys that have diversified rooflines for hundreds of years will cease to have a function. It’s already apparent what the long-term effects of this might be: in Child Okeford, there is a new cul-de-sac called Bower (Fig 3), Modernist in style, but with appropriate local materials, with alternating panels of flint and wood cladding and brick details. There are, however, no chimneys, which makes the roofline boring. Growing pressure to install solar panels on roofs will create another aesthetic headache.

Compared with many other counties, it could be said that Dorset has been lucky in its recent housing developments and, certainly, it has been fortunate to have the example of Poundbury and the profitable lessons learned from it by firms such as CG Fry. But the threat from the very large developers, which have neither the inclination nor the business model that permits attention to either good aesthetics or good planning, remains. It is to be hoped that recent changes in Whitehall policy, aimed at combating the land-banking practised by large developers (that is, sitting on land for which planning permission has been granted, in order to keep prices up) and giving local councils and local people the power to insist on more sensitive and sympathetic design, bear rapid fruit.

In 2020, the Dorset branch of the CPRE staged a conference aimed at the county’s leading landowners, which was addressed by, among others, Lord Moray, Ben Bolgar of The Prince’s Foundation and the architectural designer Ben Pentreath, who worked on Poundbury. It is perhaps too soon to see any concrete results from the day, but it can certainly be hoped that the lessons it offered will have been learned not only by the landowners, but also by the officials and councillors present from Dorset Council, whose theoretical responsibility it is to see that housing policy is administered in an enlightened way.

Acknowledgements: Philip Fry, Peter Neal

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

In a delightfully rural area of Suffolk you'll find Woodlands, a substantial early Victorian country house set in 46 acres of gardens, parkland, woods and farmland. The house and estate are near the village of Holbrook, six miles from Ipswich, within the Shotley Peninsula Site of Special Scientific Interest and the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB; joint-agents Tim Dansie of Jackson-Stops in Ipswich and George Bramley of Knight Frank’s country department are handling the sale.

The agents quote a guide price of £2.5m for the impressive country property that is for sale for the first time in its history, having been owned by five generations of the Hunter-Rodwell family since 1845, when distinguished banker and MP Benjamin Bridges Hunter-Rodwell, the son of William Rodwell, the Mayor of Ipswich, built Woodlands on the site of a former hunting lodge in this picturesque and quiet corner of Suffolk. The sale follows the death in 2019 of Andrew Hunter-Rodwell, who was the fifth member of his family to own the estate.

Alternatively, the property is being offered in up to three lots, at a guide price of £1.75m for Lot 1, the main house with its gardens, grounds and five acres of parkland, some 12 acres in all. Lot 2, priced at £250,000, comprises three arable fields surrounding the house (some 32 acres in all) that are farmed under a farm agreement secured for three generations. Lot 3, on offer at £500,000, is a range of farm buildings with its own separate driveway and potential for a number of uses, including agricultural, equestrian or residential use, subject to the usual planning requirements.

Benjamin’s son William, who qualified as a barrister in 1875 and was a JP for Suffolk, was a first-class cricketer and a member of the MCC. He served in the Suffolk Yeomanry and married Constance Ruggles-Brise of Spains Hall, now the home of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and his family.

William’s eldest son, Sir Cecil Hunter-Rodwell, also served in the Suffolk Yeomanry and went on to pursue a career overseas as a colonial administrator, serving as Governor of Fiji from 1918 to 1984, Governor of British Guiana from 1924 to 1928 and Governor of Southern Rhodesia from 1928 to 1934. Sir Cecil died in 1953, leaving Woodlands to his eldest son, Col Evelyn Hunter-Rodwell, who served in the Second World War before returning to his Suffolk roots, where, over time, he was a JP, a partner in a maltings company and a chicken farmer, as well as serving on no fewer than 22 committees.

Col Hunter-Rodwell left Woodlands to his eldest son, Andrew, who built a house for his growing family on part of the Woodlands estate until his parents moved to nearby Stutton, and he and his family moved to the ‘big house’. His daughter, Miranda Kwiatkowski, recalls an idyllic childhood at Woodlands, where she and her sisters, Camilla and Patricia, ‘without a road in sight, rode ponies and cycled for miles through the glorious surrounding countryside. Otherwise we were climbing trees, making dens or going to the closest beach, Harkstead, a few miles away’.

The focal point of life was the house itself, especially the vast, galleried hall with its wonderful vaulted, plaster-panelled ceiling and beautiful wide oak staircase. Mrs Kwiatkowski remembers the excitement of seeing a towering Christmas tree being put up in the hall, with ‘red satin ribbon cascading down the stairs, and no sliding down the bannisters allowed at that time’. Another great moment was when her parents discovered marble fireplaces beneath layers of paint in the reception rooms.

Many alterations and improvements took place over the years, both inside the house and outside, where a swimming pool was installed, the original grass tennis court was opened up and the croquet lawn provided hours of entertainment for young and old. Today, Woodlands is again a blank canvas, with more than 9,700sq ft of accommodation on three floors, including a grand reception hall, three main reception rooms, a kitchen/breakfast room, playroom, office, two bedroom suites, six further bedrooms, two bathrooms and two flats.

Selling agent Mr Dansie is optimistic about the prospects for this house of happy memories at a time when, he maintains, ‘there are still more buyers than sellers at this end of the market and Woodlands is what everyone here is looking for — a classic country house with close connections to London’.

Woodlands is for sale via Jackson-Stops and Knight Frank at £2.5 million for the whole house and estate — see more details and pictures.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

The Isle of Wight is not shy of spectacular coastal properties. Known for its world-renowned sailing competitions, music festivals, expansive beaches and sheltered coves; it’s no wonder residents and visitors flock here in their thousands every year. It is a summer watersports mecca, with excellent pubs and restaurants to match.

Arriving to the market via Winkworth with a guide price of £4.5 million is Woodlands Vale, a property unlike many of the other properties we’ve covered in the Isle of Wight, largely due to its fascinating history and close ties with royalty.

It is also one of the few remaining private estates on the island, according to the agents.

Woodlands Vale was built in 1870 by the celebrated Victorian architect Teulon, in the French Renaissance style, for Lord Calthorpe. Lord Calthorpe was a Crimean War veteran who was a close friend of Queen Victoria.

After Prince Albert died of Typhoid fever in 1861, Queen Victoria spent an increasing amount of time at their home, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight and, subsequently, visited Woodlands Vale on numerous occasions.

It was during one visit, whilst the Queen was admiring the coastal views from the property, that she commented that an ornate metal pillar in the centre of the terrace was blocking her view of the Solent. Lord Calthorpe wasted no time in having it removed and the terrace today remains as Queen Victoria wished — unobscured, with impeccable views.

Grade II listed, Woodlands Vale spans 13,000 sq. ft of internal living space that retains many of its original Victorian features and charm. Beautiful stained-glass windows, a Minton tiled floor, plaster ceilings and decorative architrave are just some of the stand-out characteristics.

There are six well-sized bedrooms in total, including the master suite with a dressing room, bathroom and study. All the bedrooms enjoy either sea or garden views and a further bedroom can be found in an additional wing with a self-catered flat. There is also further potential to create more bedrooms in the rear wing.

On the ground floor are six drawing rooms, including the magnificent Billiard room (formerly the conservatory), with its dramatic double-height ceilings and framed cupola.

The kitchen is spacious and light, with an AGA, large central island and French doors that lead out to the garden.

Externally, the house sits in 30 acres of glorious, Grade II listed landscapes, made up of formal gardens, a croquet lawn, a heated swimming pool and parkland.

Large terraces near the house mean you can enjoy al fresco meals outside whilst soaking up the views, and the parklands that lie beyond the ha-ha run all the way to the seafront, providing direct access to the beach.

The Island is renowned for its world class sailing — particularly Cowes week, which takes place during August — and is home to many established yacht clubs and sailing clubs.

Just a hop, skip and a jump across the Solent, the Isle of Wight can be reached by car via regular ferry services. If you are on foot, then a catamaran runs from both Portsmouth and Southampton; or for those wishing to travel by air, a clear approach near Woodlands Vale allows for a helicopter arrival, or there is a small airfield close by for light aircraft.

Woodlands Vale is currently on the market via Winkworth with a guide price of £4.5 million — see more pictures or enquire with the agent for further details.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

This ‘micro estate’ in west Cornwall might be one of my favourite ever houses that we’ve featured on these pages.

Boasting not one, not two, nor three, but four separate buildings, Mill House and its 5½ acres of gardens and grounds is the kind of property that could inspire just about anyone.

Roskennals Mill is currently on the market via Lillicrap Chilcott with a guide price of £2.25 million.

Located between the villages of Newbridge and Madron — just three miles inland from Penzance, the estate sits in a wonderful position; close enough to the coast and West Cornwall’s unofficial capital of Penzance, whilst enjoying the leafy privacy of its secluded grounds.

Roskennals Mill can be traced back to 1310, when it was then known as Raskernel, with the earliest known mill on the site traced to the 17^th century. According to the agents, it’s understood to be one of the last working grist mills in West Cornwall, where it operated until the 1980’s.

The current owners have lived at the property since 2007 and have carried out extensive works within that time. The buildings have been renovated to an exceptionally high standard, whilst the grounds have received the same level of attention, making them a true haven; formed of a collection of lawned areas, wildflower meadows, a stream, a wildlife pond and a landscaped, tiered rear garden.

The main house offers five bedrooms and some 2,800sq ft, whereas further accommodation can be found in the three detached converted granite buildings. The Mill (1,384sq ft), the Granary (926sq ft) and Ella’s Pottery (351sq ft) can be used for hosting guests, rental income, studio space, offices—the possibilities are almost endless.

The surrounding west Cornwall landscape is the perfect frame with Penzance and Newlyn just down the road; St Ives, with its cafes, art galleries and sandy beaches, just seven miles away; the charming fishing village of Mousehole five miles away and a number of excellent surfing beaches.

Roskennals Mill is an inspiring opportunity with boundless possibilities in one of the counties prettiest locations.

Roskennals Mill is currently on the market via Lillicrap Chilcott with a guide price of £2.25 million — see more pictures or enquire with the agent for further details. 

Set against a backdrop of tight supply and increased demand from private and institutional investors alike, the value of English farmland soared in 2022 to levels last seen in 2016.

Alex Lawson of Savills, who were joint agents with Bidwells in the disposal of the two most important farming estates sold in England this year, sets the scene: ‘With the supply of farmland offered for sale in 2022 the lowest in years at 120,000 acres, compared with a 10-year average of 150,000 acres, there was intense competition for two prime arable estates, the 4,179-acre Coldham estate near Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and the 4,206-acre Goole estate in East Yorkshire, which were offered for sale in April with a combined asking price of £87.5 million and sold for more than the guide to an existing institutional investor.’

The market for residential and sporting estates kicked off in March with the launch onto the market of the historic, 773-acre Hexton Manor estate near the picturesque village of Hexton, five miles from Hitchen, Hertfordshire, and 40 miles from central London. Offered as a whole or in two lots, Lot 1, comprising the partially restored, 14,500sq ft, Grade II-listed manor house with six houses and cottages and a converted stable courtyard, set in 170 acres of formal and wild gardens, parkland and fishing lakes, sold in November to a Euro-pean buyer, at a guide price of £10m through joint agents Knight Frank and Savills.

Currently under offer at a guide price of £5m, Lot 2 comprises the remaining acreage of land, including productive farmland in the north of the estate and the steep wooded valleys to the south that are home to the prestigious Hexton pheasant and partridge shoot, said to be the finest in the northern Home Counties.

Farms and estates in Hampshire are always in short supply and invariably command a premium. Following the launch onto the market, in mid December 2021, of secluded Medstead Grange near Alton, a pristine country house built in 2015 with palatial equestrian facilities set in 152 acres of gardens, parkland and farmland, Will Matthews of Knight Frank clinched a sale to an overseas buyer in June 2022, at a guide price of £16m.

‘It was great to be a seller in 2022, not so great if you were trying to buy,’ says Matt Sudlow of Strutt & Parker, who cites the example of thriving, 508-acre West Farmhouse at Popham, near Micheldever, a much sought-after part of Hampshire between Basingstoke and Winchester, which came to the market in April, sold in July and completed in September.

The buyer was a private investor with farming experience, who paid more than the £7.25m guide price to secure the property, which he plans to farm in hand.

The situation was no less competitive in Oxfordshire, where Mr Sudlow found a buyer for the charming, 498-acre Warborough Farm at Letcombe Regis on the Berkshire Downs, three miles south-west of Wantage, which was relaunched in February following an aborted sale.

The farm had everything a country family could wish for — an unlisted Georgian farmhouse, three cottages, modern and traditional farm buildings, stabling, paddocks, woodland, a family shoot and glorious views across the Vale of White Horse — and was sold after 28 viewings to a lifestyle buyer who exchanged contracts in May and completed in June, at more than the £6.5m guide price.

Although few grand estates made it to the open market in 2022, September saw the launch in Country Life, at a guide price of £16m, of one of Oxfordshire’s most perfectly situated, but least-known country houses. This was the timeless, Grade II-listed Woodleys at Wootton, three miles from Woodstock, which sits at the heart of a historic, 230-acre, residential and farming estate on the edge of the Cotswolds AONB, 10 miles from Chipping Norton and 12 miles from Oxford.

Will Matthews of Knight Frank reports a recent exchange of contracts on the estate owned by the Ponsonby family since 1881, the focal point of which is the imposing, late-Georgian house, which stands in a serene parkland setting looking south across its gardens towards the golden façade of Blenheim Palace in the distance — an Arcadian vista little changed in more than 200 years.

Meanwhile, up in Northamptonshire, Mr Matthews found a UK buyer for the 276-acre Steane Park estate, which lies to the east of Farthinghoe village and west of the market town of Brackley, close to the county borders of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

Launched on the market in March at a guide price of £9m, the estate centres on a lovely 16th-century stone manor house that was the home of Sir Thomas Crewe, Speaker of the House of Commons in the 17th century, and owned through the 1900s by the Norris brewing family of Brackley, who trained racehorses on Steane Park’s private gallops, a practice continued by the vendors, who bought the estate in 1989. During their tenure, the charming 10-bedroom house, with its cottages, stabling and extensive outbuildings, has been beautifully renovated throughout, with the addition of wonderful gardens that have been regularly opened to the public.

Over in East Anglia, Savills presided over the successful sale, for the first time in more than 100 years, of the multi-faceted, 1,776-acre Exning estate at Exning, two miles north of Newmarket on the Suffolk/Cambridgeshire border, which came to the market in early June at a guide price of £50 million following the death in 2021, at the age of 94, of its long-term sporting owner, Simon Gibson.

Under his stewardship, Exning evolved into a dynamic country estate, with an impressive mix of farming, residential, equestrian, renewable and commercial assets, from the renowned Rossdales Equine Hospital, three stud farms, a DIY livery business and a 155-acre solar farm to the lettings of former aircraft hangars and retail property in Newmarket, not to mention garages, sports pitches and telecom masts. However, racing was Gibson’s first love and, having inherited not only the estate and business acumen of his uncle, Lord Glanely, but also his famous racing colours, he saw success on the racecourse over the years with horses trained at James Fanshawe’s Pegasus stables in Newmarket. Exning sold as a whole in October to an institutional buyer.

Further north, in Norfolk’s Waveney Valley, Charlie Paton of Savills’s farms and estates team saw the launch onto the market in March of the high-powered, 1,953-acre Gawdy Hall farming estate near Harleston, 12 miles from Diss and 19 miles from Norwich, at a guide price of £24.25m for the whole or in seven lots.

Although the original ‘big house’ on the estate was demolished in 1939, there remained the original 117-acre landscaped park- land, serpentine lake and ancillary buildings, including the former entrance building and the impressive coach house, which could provide an appropriate setting for a fine new country house, subject to planning.

On the other hand, constant reinvestment in the land and buildings over the years has seen the now highly mechanised farm evolve from a payroll of 58 men working 1,050 acres in 1953, to three men working an acreage of almost twice that size today. ‘It was rare to find a ring-fenced, near 2,000-acre farming estate for sale in Norfolk with an extensive residential portfolio, a large block of ancient woodland — the setting for a former shoot — and the potential to create a new principal house in historic parkland,’ said Mr Paton. Gawdy Hall estate sold as a whole in September to a private individual.

Further north again, the top end of the rural property market has been a fruitful one this year for Andrew Black of Savills in York, who handled the successful sales of Grade I-listed Gilling Castle in North Yorkshire (pictured at the top of this page) and Grade II*-listed Meldon Park in Northumberland, with Grade II*-listed Lartington Hall in Co Durham and Grade I- listed The Nunnery over in Cumbria both currently under offer.

Known throughout ‘God’s Country’ as the former prep school to Ampleforth College, Gilling Castle failed to find a buyer when last offered for sale in 2018.

The historic country house, owned by the powerful Fairfax family for 400 years from 1489, was then relaunched on the market in June 2022 with 100-odd acres and a guide price of £3.75m. It sold to a corporate buyer with sheltered housing in mind.

Offered for sale for the first time since 1835, Meldon Park sits in 36 acres of historic wooded parkland overlooking an ancient deer park at the heart of the Cookson family’s 3,800-acre estate, six miles from the market town of Morpeth and 20 miles from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A guide price of £3.5m was quoted for the elegant Georgian house built for Isaac Cookson, the younger son of a successful Newcastle banker, by the prolific northern architect John Dobson, with internal alterations carried out in the 1930s by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Interestingly, it was bought by a buyer relocating from Scotland.

Way out west, the launch onto the market of the idyllic and wonderfully private 920-acre Strete estate in the coveted South Hams area of the South Devon AONB, at a guide price of £11.5m through Savills, brought a flood of enquiries from far and wide and sold for ‘considerably more’ than the guide to a buyer with South-West connections.

Located within easy reach of the sailing towns of Dartmouth and Salcombe, the estate, which overlooks the quaint coastal village of Strete, had been owned by successive generations of the same family and was in serious need of renovation, notably in the case of the principal house at Higher Fuge Farm, a fine Grade II*-listed Georgian farmhouse built in 1726. Also hidden within the estate are the beautiful and untouched Gara Valley and Strete Gate Beach, which were evacuated and used as a training ground for British and US forces on the run-up to D-Day. The Gara Valley, which has never been repopulated, provides a valuable habitat for a huge variety of rare flora, fauna and over-wintering birds.

Meanwhile, down in deepest Herefordshire, Matt Sudlow of Strutt & Parker oversaw the launch in May, for the first time in more than 100 years, of the splendidly unspoilt Upleadon Court with its surrounding 201-acre arable and grassland farm, six miles north-west of Ledbury and 13 miles from the cathedral city of Hereford. A guide price of £4m was quoted for the farm with its imposing Georgian main house, the home of the owner, man and boy, who, with no family member to take it on, had finally decided to retire.

Here again, fierce competition saw a sale concluded at ‘way over’ the asking price, leaving Mr Sudlow to find words of comfort for the disgruntled under-bidders. ‘I could have sold it 10 times over,’ he says, sadly.

Country Life's top 10 property stories of 2022

From castles and cottages to manor houses and an entire peninsula of a Scottish island, enjoy our list of the

The biggest country house sales of 2022, from the house built by Lutyens for Jekyll to a dream home that 'could have sold six times over'

Despite lashings of insecurity, both political and economic, the prime country-house market still managed to have a year to remember,

Loch Ness — £1,450,000

There's more than 1,100 acres of land on offer at this Invernessshire property located just above Loch Ness, not far from the fabulously-named Drumnadrochit, the town that's the location of the Loch Ness Centre.

This is land that's barren and spectacular, but there is potential here for pinewood planting — and one of the three parcels into which the property is split has a well-established planting scheme in place. Or you could just roam your own personal stretch of the Highlands and enjoy the spectacular views across the mountains and the waters of Loch Glanaidh.

For sale with Galbraith. See more pictures of this property.

Argyll — £2,450,000

Just 75 miles north of Glasgow (and 25 from Oban) you'll find this gorgeous slice of the West Highlands, sitting above the River Orchy.

There is 1,971 acres of space here at Craig Hill, once managed as an upland sheep and cattle farm along with deer stalking on the hills. That has changed more recently, with 160 or so acres established as native woodland in 2013, and approval from Scottish Forestry to create over 500 acres more — something which opens up the possibility, according to the agents, of allowing a purchaser to proceed with a Forestry Grant Scheme application to seek approval for grant funding.

For sale with Landfor. See more pictures of this property.

Fife — £3,000,000

Will it be peatland restoration? Woodland? Or how about a solar farm? All are among the options suggested by the agents at the 1,001-acre Outh Farm, which sits more or less half-way between Edinburgh and Gleneagles.

Part of Black Loch, located on the northern boundary, is included in the sale, while Nettly Burn also adds an attractive watery element to this stretch of Scotland.

For sale with Goldcrest. See more pictures of this property.

Argyll — £3,300,000

Some 1,759 acres on the northern side of Loch Fyne make up the land for sale at Goatfield Hill, in Cumlodden.

Most of the land is open hillside that is currently grazed, though there are many opportunities for a new buyer, from forestry conservation to sporting pursuits.

For sale with Goldcrest. See more pictures of this property.

Caithness — £3,500,000

If you're looking for land which comes with a place to lay your head, this glorious coastal estate on the far north coast of Scotland, near Thurso, will fit the bill.

A historic harbour, net store and bothy flat (all category A-listed) and over two miles of coastline are part of the 8,137 acres for sale, while a three-bed cottage is also available by separate negotiation. There are also peat and woodland restoration projects already in place on the property.

For sale with Savills. See more pictures of this property.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Constructed in about 1854 to the designs of the famous Shropshire architect Edward Haycock, Penylan Mansion is situated on the outskirts of the small settlement of Llandygwydd, near Cardigan.

One of the finest private estates in Wales, the Grade II*-listed property has been renovated and refurbished over a period of 20 years to the most exacting standards. It’s now on the market via Country Living Group with a guide price of £4 million.

Reputedly once home to the Queen’s second cousin Lady Audrey Beatrice Morris, the 17-bedroom home and its surrounding 13 acres are fit for royalty.

Inside, the countless bedrooms are almost matched by 10 reception rooms, each distinctively decorated. The main staircase hall features a sky light and trompe l’oeil decorated walls; the ground floor is rounded out by a separate courtyard, as well as a gym and swimming-pool complex.

Outside, the grounds sit on the north bank of the River Teifi and feature a wealth of outbuildings that are ripe for conversion into further accommodation. An ‘L’ shaped barn near the mansion houses two self-contained cottages, a two-storey large triple bay coach house, and a two-storey cottage.

The thriving market town of Cardigan is just ten minutes from the estate and provides a wide range of amenities from shops, restaurants, galleries, antique shops and cafes with an arty flair. In the summer months, music takes over and the grounds of Cardigan Castle transform into a venue for musicians and bands.

It’s here you’ll also find beautiful scenery, easy access to the sea and all the quirks and charms of a traditional Welsh market town, as well as a number of renowned schools.

Penylan Mansion is, as the agents note, a historic estate that ‘perfectly reflects the grandeur and opulence of its original design in the painstaking renovation carried out by the current owners. Penylan Mansion represents the pinnacle of the housing market in the region and is a truly stunning proposition for a buyer.’

Penylan Mansion is currently on the market via Country Living Group with a guide price of £4 million — see more pictures or enquire with the agent for further details. 

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Located at the head of the Knapdale Peninsula — an area known for its immeasurable beauty and some of the most important geological and ecological landscape in Scotland — is the breathtaking Tayvallich Estate.

This isn’t the first time we’ve featured a spectacular Scottish estate, as regular readers will know. However, this is certainly one of the most eye-catching, both in terms of its size and breadth of properties.

The coastal estate is now up for sale via agents Strutt & Parker for offers over £10.465 million for the whole, or in 13 lots.

There is no one major manor house or principal property within the estate; instead, there is a wide and varied collection of houses and dwellings, ranging from contemporary and spacious to cosy and rustic.

The most substantial property within the estate is Coshandrochaid House, an 'imaginatively designed’ two-storey house built in 2011 on the site of a much older stone farm building, with views over the southern peninsular.

The remaining properties (with the exception of two cottages), are traditional one-and-a-half-storey stone buildings with pitched roofs, all occupying enviable positions on the estate with stunning views.

Tayvallich is formed of 3,380 acres of mixed-used coastal estate, but that’s not all, because also included in the sale is Danna Island. It's often referred to as the ‘jewel in the crown of the estate’, an island of some 800 acres with four miles of coastal frontage, several jetties, a boathouse and some incredible beaches.

The Sound of Jura lies along the western boundary, whilst Loch Sween, the sheltered lagoon An Grianan and Linne Mhuirich form the eastern boundary.

'The Tayvallich Peninsula is like no other I’ve seen on the market in the past two decades,' says Robert McCulloch, Head of Estates & Farm Agency in Scotland.

'With four separate bodies of water forming its coastline, and comprised of a cluster of islands of varying size, the estate’s landscape is one of undulating topography liberally cloaked with native woodland. It is a truly exceptional place.

'For buyers to have the opportunity to purchase lots ranging from a 1,700-acre estate on a tranquil and verdant peninsula to an 811-acre self-contained island is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We expect a busy autumn of enquiries.'

As you’d expect from a place so unspoilt and rugged — the wildlife is fantastic, with the agents noting that the area is home to some of the most varied marine life in Scotland. There is also a wide range of bird, mammal and plant life, including ‘rare and unusual resident and migratory species.’

The elusive mix of landscape, geology and natural history of the estate means it is protected under five different SSSIs (Site of Special Scientific Interest) and three SACs (Special Area of Conservation).

Historically, Tayvallich was run as a sporting estate, and there is potential for reared and wild game shooting, should future tenants wish. The spearfishing, snorkelling and fishing is world class, with lobsters, crabs and shellfish in abundance. The jetties located at Port-nan-Gallan (as well as the boathouse) mean craft of almost any size can be launched, allowing for ‘virtually endless’ exploration opportunities within the Inner Hebrides or farther afield.

This truly is a rare and exciting opportunity to live, own and work in one of Scotland’s most diverse and breathtaking corners.

The Tayvallich Estate is currently on the market via Strutt & Parker for offers over £10.465 million — see more pictures or enquire with the agent for further details. 

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Spectacular Scottish castles and estates for sale

A look at the finest castles, country houses and estates for sale in Scotland today.

At the southern edge of the Cotswolds AONB, David Cross of Savills in Salisbury is overseeing the sale, following the owner’s retirement, of picturesque Lower Shockerwick Farm in the pretty rural hamlet of that name, 5 1/2 miles north-east of Bath and 9 1/2 miles from Chippenham, Wiltshire.

On offer as a whole at a guide price of £5.35m or in six lots, the 200-acre holding comprises a Grade II-listed 17th-century four-bedroom farmhouse remodelled, according to its listing, in 1793, which enjoys views across its own land to the impressive landscape beyond; a range of modern and traditional farm buildings with development potential; two farm cottages currently let on a long-term basis; equestrian facilities including stabling for nine horses, a hay barn, storage and outdoor manège, currently run as a livery yard; and a historic threshing barn with lapsed planning consent for conversion to residential use.

The land at Lower Shockerwick Farm is set to pasture, interspersed with small areas of woodland, and includes water meadows and frontage to the River Bybrook, known to support populations of native brown trout. ‘It’s rare indeed to find a quintessential Cotswold farm with evident development potential a stone’s throw from the historic city of Bath,’ comments Mr Cross.

Lower Shockerwick is situated northeast of Bath, on the edge of the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The nearby village of Bathford is home to a church, pub and village store, whilst a primary school, medical facilities and a general store can be found in Batheaston. The World Heritage City of Bath is just over five miles away, home to beautiful Georgian architecture, Roman heritage and excellent schools and universities.

Lower Shockerwick Farm is currently on the market via Savills with a guide price of £5.35 million — see more pictures or enquire with the agent for further details. 

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Launching onto the market for the first time in 700 years is one of Cheshire’s great land holdings, the 1,921-acre Adlington Hall estate, which lies five miles east of Wilmslow, seven miles north of Macclesfield and 16 miles south of Manchester. At its heart stands Grade I-listed Adlington Hall, a quadrangular building set around a central courtyard.

Built on the site of a Saxon hunting lodge, it has been the seat of the Legh family since 1315.

The historic estate, which comprises six let farms, a further 22 houses and cottages, plus various ancillary buildings and parcels of land, is for sale through Savills and Mark Wiggin, at a guide price of £30 million — a huge amount, and in recognition of the fact that not everybody would want to take on the whole thing, the sellers are willing to divide it up in to 25 lots.

The first of three articles in Country Life (November 28, December 5 and 12, 1952) traces the history of Adlington Hall, from ‘Saxon hunting-box long since disappeared; Tudor rebuilding in two stages; Caroline restoration after the Civil War; [and] Georgian additions which completed the quadrangle, to modern demolitions which have made the house more manageable in these increasingly difficult times’.

Adlington is mentioned in the Domesday survey as Edulvinstane, which was owned before the Conquest by the Saxon Earl Edwin and then by Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester and nephew of William the Conqueror, who inherited the family passion for hunting. In those days, the estate was located within the Royal Forest of Macclesfield, a famous hunting venue that, in its heyday, stretched from Macclesfield to the Mersey.

On Lupus’s death, the manor reverted to the Crown and, early in the 13th century, was granted to the Norman family of de Corona, four generations of whom lived at Adlington. The last member of the family to own it was Thomas de Corona who, having no heir, gave the manor to his sister, Ellen, and her husband, John de Legh. There have been Leghs at Adlington ever since.

In the late 1400s, the hunting lodge at Adlington was replaced by the original Adlington Hall, built by Thomas de Legh between 1480 and 1505. The next stage in the development of the house was carried out by Thomas’s great-grandson, also Thomas, who was High Sheriff of Cheshire in 1588.

By 1581, he had refaced the hall, added the porch and built the range of half-timbered, black-and-white buildings that fill part of the north side and the whole of the east side of the hall.The west side of the quadrangle was probably left open, whereas, to the south, there would have been a detached gatehouse with a bridge over the moat that once surrounded the whole house.

During the Civil War, Adlington was held for the Crown by Thomas’s grandson, Col Thomas Legh, and twice besieged by Parliamentary forces. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Col Thomas Legh the younger, whose estates were confiscated after the Civil War, but eventually restored to him in 1656.

After two sieges and several years of neglect, the house was in desperate need of repair and the restoration that followed included the addition of the present north front of the house, which dates from about 1660.

Col Legh died in 1689 and was succeeded by his eldest son, another Thomas, whose reign at Adlington was brief. According to a diary preserved at nearby Tabley House, Knutsford, on April 6, 1691: ‘Col Legh, of Adlington, layning on a raile in Adlington, which breaking he fell and broak his neck and died.’

He was followed by his eldest surviving son, John, who made considerable alterations to the interior of the hall, although it was his only son, Charles, who was responsible for Adlington’s next and greatest transformation.

Charles inherited the estate on his father’s death in 1739 and, within a few years, he had embarked on extensive improvements to the house and its surroundings. He began by filling in the open west side of the quadrangle with a wing containing a staircase, dining room, drawing room, library and ballroom, which was completed by about 1749.

He then replaced the buildings on the south side of the quadrangle with a range connecting his new west wing with the old east wing. At either end of the south front were projecting bays, demolished in 1929 when the size of the house was considerably curtailed.

When enlarging the house, Legh also built the Grade II*-listed stable courtyard to the east of the hall and extensively remodelled the park and gardens, also listed Grade II*, creating a formal water garden to the north, and a pleasure-ground known as The Wilderness around the River Dean, which meanders through the estate from north to south.

A wonderful example of a woodland garden with a number of follies, eyecatchers and many specimen trees, The Wilderness is entered through gates dating from 1688, which lead to the Dutch Lime Walk planted to commemorate the accession to the throne of William of Orange and Queen Mary.

For sale at a guide price of £12.5m, Lot 1 comprises the south side and Georgian part of the hall, which has been used as a private family home in recent years. The east side of the 20,000sq ft building includes the estate office, kitchen and chapel, whereas the northern section houses the magnificent Tudor Great Hall with its organ, forever associated with Legh’s friend Handel, and some of Adlington Hall’s oldest and most important rooms, predominantly used in recent years for weddings and other events.

Lot 1 also includes the north and east lodges, 10 period mews houses in the former stable courtyard (currently let on assured shorthold tenancies), together with Adlington’s park, gardens and The Wilderness—some 160 acres in all.

Alex Lawson of Savills comments: ‘What is significant about the sale of the Adlington Estate is that it is a complete country estate with real historic provenance, including an important, Grade I-listed hall that has been in the same family for 700 years. This is doubly rare in Cheshire, where nothing of similar scale has been seen on the market in decades. In fact, according to our records, only one farm of more than 1,000 acres has been seen on the open market since 1995.’

Adlington Hall Estate is currently on the market via Savills and Mark Wiggin with a guide price of £30 million — see more pictures, or enquire with the agents for further details. 

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

Penny Dart from the Savills Exeter branch and Alex Lawson from the Savills London office are handling the sale of a great survivor of a bygone era, the 920-acre Strete estate, which overlooks the quaint coastal village of Strete, within the sought-after South Hams in the South Devon AONB and within easy reach of the sailing towns of Dartmouth and Salcombe.

Owned by successive generations of the same family, the property is being offered at £11.5m for the whole, or in up to 11 lots. The guide price for Lot 1, the 184-acre Higher Fugue Farm, is £2.8m.

According to its Historic England listing, Strete was formerly in the parish of Blackawton and, ‘after the dissolution of the manor of Blackawton came into the possession of the Russells who in 1618 sold it to the Roopes of Dartmouth [who] owned Fuge’.

Today, the main farmhouse at Higher Fuge Farm, a former dairy farm at the heart of the estate, is a fine Grade II*-listed Georgian place built in 1726. Now in need of renovation, it retains its original walled garden and comes with a range of modern and traditional farm buildings surrounded by productive farmland.

It offers more than 5,500sq ft of accommodation on two floors, including a large entrance hall with a grand staircase, an open-plan kitchen/dining room, drawing room, five bedrooms and a family bathroom. The eastern wing is presently arranged as a self-contained, two-bedroom property.

In addition, the estate boasts two let farms: Lower Fuge Farm (guide price £1.45m) is a 253-acre mixed dairy farm let on an Agricultural Holdings Act tenancy, with a stone farmhouse, a range of modern and traditional farm buildings and farmland, plus 12 acres of in-hand woodland and amenity land; and Coxs Farm, price £1.9m, a grassland farm with a modern farmhouse and lovely views along the coast.

The estate also includes four further houses and cottages, including a magical mill house and mill buildings, together with strategic land surrounding the village of Strete.

Hidden within the estate are the beautiful and untouched Gara Valley and Strete Gate Beach, which were evacuated towards the end of the Second World War and used as a training ground for British and American forces on the run-up to D-Day.

Although, nowadays, Strete Gate Bridge is open to the public, the Gara Valley has never been re-populated and provides a valuable habitat for a huge variety of rare flora, fauna and over-wintering and breeding birds.

The Strete Estate is currently on the market via Savills with a guide price of £11.5 million — see more pictures or enquire with the agent for further details.

Credit: Strutt and Parker

Best country houses for sale this week

An irresistible West Country cottage and a magnificent Cumbrian country house make our pick of the finest country houses for

'You would have to be a cricket lover to take on this property,’ says Sarah Roué, director at Savills’ rural division in Exeter ‘because every Sunday you will look directly out onto a cricket match.’ This is aptly named Cricket House, a handsome cottage set right against the pitch boundary in the deer park of the ancient Boconnoc estate in Cornwall, formerly the seat of the Pitt family. An unusual, rustic dwelling, ‘a quirky, historic building in a very special location,’ continues Mrs Roué, ‘it will attract a very different sort of interest’.

The market for tenanted homes on estate domains is currently riding very high — so much so, in fact, that Cricket House has now been rented out. It's been buoyed by the exodus from London during the pandemic and the machinations of the buying sector, which are slowing down transactions.

‘The competition for estate lettings is extremely hot,’ explains Rob Jones-Davies, a director of the RJD Consultancy. ‘You’ve got to find a property, move fast, and then expect to be scrutinised more diligently than for a standard rental.’

Living within the precincts of a country-house estate is a desirable prospect, increasingly so, as current trends would suggest—and the cachet derived from a rich historic provenance, a robust sense of identity (think Cowdray’s yellow window frames in West Sussex), good-looking buildings and scenic backdrops only adds to the allure.

Much depends on the owner, their commercial interests and diversification of the estate, but they tend to pursue a more proactive approach than private landlords and the benefits for both parties can be considerable, promoting long-term occupancy, an interactive community and access to a range of facilities not on offer elsewhere. Some estates provide gardening services, others discounted firewood; most have building-maintenance staff on call and some put on events — such as for the recent jubilee celebrations.

At the moment, what might be available to let could be more accessible than prohibitively expensive equivalents to buy. Grade II-listed Beamsley Hall, for example, is a striking mini mansion on the Duke of Devonshire’s Bolton Abbey estate in North Yorkshire. Outwardly a 19th-century rebuild, it actually contains evidence of Norman origins and 16th-century fabric, with deeds dating back to 1400.

‘This is an exceptional property in one of the most beautiful places in Britain,’ says estate manager David Barrett. Its recent re-emergence on the rental market with Savills for £9,500 pcm — which includes a gardener — follows investment of time and money upgrading the structure.

Estate landlords often put in considerable effort to maintain what is usually an older stock of housing, going well beyond the norm in management standards — ‘we also clean gutters and sweep chimneys,’ adds Mr Barrett, ‘and the estate assumes much of the day-to-day maintenance, which, by rights, would fall to the responsibility of the tenant’.

However, there are downsides. Less and less might be done the longer a tenant stays. ‘Sometimes, properties can be tired,’ warns Alice Protheroe, director and head of Cotswolds lettings at Strutt & Parker, ‘and it is not until someone leaves that the estate might replace or upgrade.’

Refurbishing what is often a substantial property holding is a serious investment, with landlords bearing the financial load for the upkeep of historic buildings, which are often less well insulated, usually with single glazing, then encumbered with modern energy-efficiency requirements, so be aware of a landowner’s long-term plans.

Roger Tempest, the custodian of the Broughton Hall estate in North Yorkshire, has limited his residential lettings, cautioning that, at times, returns are low for landlords, especially after taking into account maintenance costs, including rewiring, reheating and reroofing. ‘It’s not necessarily a great business,’ he says, although rentals ‘are part of the social provision on the estates who don’t want to sell.’

If some estates are restricting lettings, others are now engaging in the socially responsible approach, ingeniously being pursued at Blenheim Palace, where a pioneering legacy development, Park View, comprises brand-new houses to buy alongside dozens of both market and affordable rents, an arrangement made possible via collaboration with West Oxfordshire Council.

Each house designed by Hugh Petter and the team at Adam Architecture acknowledges the Woodstock aesthetics, with a varied palette of materials and colours, avoiding bland uniformity, and the work revives traditional skills, including dry-stone walling.

This project, which should be completed within the next two years, ‘is to support the local community’, says Gemma Else, Blenheim Palace’s marketing manager. ‘We have already been in consultation with other estates to consider our blueprint of what has been done, and successfully achieved.’

The joys of renting on an estate

• Each estate has individual character and is linked to the community. Estates are likely to look for long-term tenants who might work locally, could contribute to the social environment, including populating rural schools, and care for often older properties and gardens
• An estate landlord is usually: less absentee, more hands-on and more proactive than ‘conventional’ private lettings; more likely to consider changes to properties for mutual benefit; relaxed about pet ownership
• Although demand for estate properties is still very high post-pandemic — many properties could be ‘let several times over’, especially within range of London — once you’re in, you can hope to stay put for a while
• Most estates adopt the conventional assured shorthold tenancy agreements, although tenants could be asked to sign up for two years initially, sometimes longer, to ensure continuity