Five fabulous houses in the heart of the moors, including a dream thatched cottage at the price of a London studio
What could be more romantic than living in the wild, rolling hills of the West Country moorland? Annie Elwes takes her pick of houses on the market right now in Exmoor, Dartmoor and the Quantocks.


Dartmoor – £595,000
A pretty thatched-barn conversion near Yeoford, on the fringes of Dartmoor in Devon, Berties Cottage has four bedrooms and 1½ acres of ‘enchanting country gardens’ on the hillside, say agents, with an orchard, vegetable patch and paddocks.
The roof is well maintained and, inside, there are charming exposed beams, floorboards, fireplaces, a woodburning stove and an Aga.
A goat house and two stables and the end of the garden could easily be converted into holiday lets, making this an incredible bargain when you consider how little the same money will buy you in London – as this £600k studio demonstrates.
For sale with Strutt & Parker . See more pictures and details about this property.
Bodmin Moor – £2.95 million
Situated at the heart of about 90 beautiful acres of pasture and farmland, complete with a family shoot and equestrian facilities, Lower Polgrain Farm is ‘an idyllic mini-estate protected by its own land’, say agents.
The principal house has five bedrooms and there are a further five created from the conversion of The Old Mill and an adjacent barn.
It is located in the village of St Wenn, Cornwall, with Wadebridge about five miles away and Padstow and Rock about 10.
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For sale with Knight Frank. See more pictures and details about this property.
Exmoor – £2.65 million
Set in some 14 acres in the north-Devon foothills of Exmoor, Elizabethan Whitechapel Manor has been impressively refurbished, with care taken to maintain its historic character.
Six reception rooms face south across the formal walled gardens.
The 11 en-suite bedrooms, two with dressing rooms, betray the manor’s spell as a country-house hotel (from 1985 to 2000). The market town of South Molton is three miles away.
For sale with Savills. See more pictures and details about this property.
Exmoor – £950,000
Tucked into the hills above the village of Luxborough, Somerset, Nurcott Farm dates to the 16th century and is unlisted. With fireplaces and three bedrooms, it has outbuildings and two stone holiday cottages (one with five bedrooms, the other two), forming a yard.
Its 6.8 acres include paddocks and a flight pond and offer views to Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on Exmoor, and over the Bristol Channel to Wales. Taunton is 20 miles away.
For sale with Greenslade Taylor Hunt. See more pictures and details about this property.
Quantocks – £1.295 million
In the hidden Somerset village of Goathurst on the edge of the Quantocks, The Arch Barn sits at the end of a drive shared with nearby folly The Temple of Pan (both were once part of the Halswell estate) and is viewed here across the spring-fed lake, with a dramatic backdrop of old quarry and woodland.
With its eponymous arched windows, galleried drawing room and exposed beams galore, it retains plenty of charm in its conversion. There are four bedrooms, plus a detached guest barn with a balcony, and the property comes with four acres.
For sale with Jackson-Stops. See more pictures and details about this property.
Credit: Strutt and Parker
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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.
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