Time to reflect

Find some perspective next to the peaceful waters of these three properties

- Penny Churchill

THE River Wye in Buckinghamshire is a chalk stream that flows southeastwards for 10 miles from its source in the Chilterns, through West Wycombe, High Wycombe, Loudwater and Wooburn Green, to its confluence with the Thames at Bourne End.

For centuries, the river powered corn and fulling mills until, in the late 1600s, the arrival of Dutch experts in papermaking and water-management led to the creation of dozens of paper mills along a complex system of watercourses between the hamlet of Loudwater and the village of Wooburn.

One of the largest was Clapton Mill, whose Dutch owner, Groner Steyn, erected an imposing family home on high ground that overlooked the millpond and the river below. Built-in the classic Queen Anne style between 1700 and 1710, with later 18th-century alterations, Steyn christened it Clapton Revel, a name derived from the Dutch for ‘mansion house’, as befitted a house of status at the heart of a 25-acre mini-estate.

An article in COUNTRY LIFE (March 6, 1937) highlights the beauty of the setting: ‘Water in the garden is always delightful, and here especially so, since besides the main stretch—a backwater of the River Wye—there are several other diversions of the river, beside which one goes by winding paths and across little bridges, finding here a secluded water garden, there a swimming pool, plantations, waterfalls, and the mill stream itself which was no doubt the original purpose of such diversion.’