The Shuttleworth Estate at Old Warden in Bedfordshire is best known today for its collection of vintage aeroplanes, but its history stretches back far earlier. In the Middle Ages, the area belonged to Warden Abbey on the other side of today’s village (its remnants are another Landmark). In the early eighteenth century, Sir Samuel Ongley, a wealthy London linen draper, bought what would become the Shuttleworth Estate and it was his descendant who, in the 1820s, created the famous Swiss Garden and began the model village of Old Warden. The Shuttleworths, rich industrialists, acquired the estate in 1872 and golden years of weekend shooting parties followed. Tragedy struck in 1940, when the sole heir Richard Shuttleworth died in a flying accident. His mother Dorothy set up an educational trust and their mansion became a college for land-based activities. We have two buildings on the estate: an early eighteenth-century folly, Queen Anne’s Summerhouse, and a nineteenth-century gamekeeper’s cottage, built in the best model tradition.

Keeper’s Cottage is tucked away in the pinewoods and ferns a couple of hundred yards below the summerhouse at the foot of the warren. It is a model gamekeeper’s establishment as might have been found in a nineteenth-century pattern book, in the tradition of the orné but in a sturdily handsome way.

It was built in 1878 for Joseph Shuttleworth, who wanted to bring the shooting on the estate up to the fashionable standards of the day, orchestrated by the gamekeeper for whom this cottage was built. For a few years we can imagine this cottage at the heart of prodigious Edwardian shooting parties, the pheasants hatched in the sitting house out back and reared in pens on the warren by the keeper.

After Richard Shuttleworth’s death, when the estate was turned to different purposes, Keeper’s Cottage was left deserted. The sitting house and yard outbuildings collapsed, and the detached kennel block became almost as ruinous. Luckily, the original plans of its local architect builder, John Usher, survived and so we were able not just to restore the cottage, but also to rebuild the outbuildings. You may not have to feed the hounds at dusk or fend off poachers, but you can still appreciate the sensible accommodation wealthy Victorians built for their employees – especially those who could raise a pheasant or two.

View our history sheet for this Landmark

Sleeps: 4