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Stay in a Farmhouse or Cottage

 

Click on a picture to find out more about the building featured, or hover over for a short description.

 

Purton Green is all that remains of on eof Suffolk's lost medieval villages. Inside the late medieval walls survives an aisled hall with scissor barced trusses dating to 1250, a great rarity that evokes its important past. The house now stands surrounded by fields, with unchanging Suffolk countryside in all directions.

 

Manor Farm was first rescued by Monica & Harry Dance, who bequeathed it to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buidlings on whose behalf we now let it. It is a mainly late- Elizabethan vernacular building, largely unaltered since its first use as the yeoman farmer’s home, who, judging from the lavish oak partitions and moulded beams within, was quite comfortably off. We continue to maintain the building with a light touch that helps keep traditional craft skills alive.

 

A sixteenth-century gentry house with many of its original features including a first floor solar open to the roof beams. It also has good claim to be the birthplace of the modern Welsh language as it was at Dolbelydr that Henry Salesbury wrote his Grammatica Britannica - the first Welsh grammar. One translation of the name is 'Meadow of the rays of the sun', an accurate description when the sunlight slants across the valley floor.

 

Behind an unassuming farmhouse front lies something rather earlier, as parts of the farmhouse date from around 1600. The house has beautiful views and behind are our own fields. It is a particularly attractive hillside of rough pasture, full of mysterious hollows, green hummocks, anthills, thorn bushes and other things to explore.

A handsome stone house, which though appears to be a single house and indeed has been for over a century, was clearly once four separate dwellings. It stands in a large sheltered walled garden high up on the top of the Cotswolds.

 

Coombe hamlet consists of a watermill, the mill house and several cottages built among orchards around a ford on a shallow stream. Hawkers Cottages are a pair of stone, cob and thatched cottages, named after the famous Vicar of Morwenstow. No. 1 is the slightly smaller cottage and has a charming window in the form of a cross. The small gardens in front are sheltered and pretty.

 

Frenchman's Creek is a secluded granite cottage in a romantic setting. It is approached by a quarter-mile path that winds it way through woodland down to the Helford River. Should you want to go elsewhere there is the Lizard to explore, and Mounts Bay, or to the east the granite elegance of Falmouth.

Obriss Farm, surrounded by traditional byres, a stable and a smokehouse has a field pattern not changed since 1840. Sitting on the lower slopes of Toys Hill, looking south over the Weald, it is a convenient distance from London but feels unexpectedly peaceful in this busy part of the country.

 

Dating from 1830, this thatched cottage is set in the woods of Peppercombe Valley, one of many steep valleys which punctuate the dramatic coastline of North Devon. A footpath winds its gentle way down to the beach where the whole magnificent coastline curves away in both directions, with Lundy on the horizon.

 

Poultry Cottage dates from 1861 and was the poultry keeper's home on the Leighton estate, where in Victorian times ornamental fowl were kept in a palatial Fowl House next door. It offers a peaceful setting (the chickens have long gone) with views across the Severn Valley to Montgomeryshire. Leighton, Powis Castle, Glansevern hall and Vaynor are all close by.

 

A substantial hall-house which was built in about 1400 and is situated on the side of a low hill in the Dee valley. Few houses of this age survive in Wales and the quality of work at Plas Uchaf is exceptional. The hall is surprisingly grand, with a roof of sophisticated carpentry and an immense sixteenth-century fireplace. At night, with the wooden ribs of the hall moving a little in the firelight you can imagine that you are Jonah in the Whale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
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