The Cottage Industry

Owning a weekend cottage is a dream to which many aspire. Flora Watkins finds out how to achieve

- Flora Watkins

I AM excessively fond of a cottage!’ exclaims Robert Ferrars to Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. ‘And I protest, if I had any money to spare, I should buy a little land and build one myself, within a short distance of London, where I might drive down myself, at any time.’

This may be the only sentiment expressed by the buffoonish Ferrars with which we can all agree, for who hasn’t dreamed of escaping the city on a Friday afternoon for their own quintessential country cottage?

It may be thatched and rendered in Suffolk pink or in mellow Cotswold stone under a roof of slate tiles. There are, quite possibly, roses around the door and, almost certainly, there is honey, still, for tea.

For Millie Johnson, her own rural idyll— in the Test Valley village of Abbotts Ann— is a mere hour and 10 minutes from home if she gets away by 3.30pm, after picking her daughter up from school in London. Her husband takes the train down later to Andover.

‘We’ll sit in the garden and have a gin and tonic and watch the sun set over the fields,’ Mrs Johnson enthuses. ‘You get a really good night’s sleep and wake feeling relaxed. We rush so much that it’s lovely to stop and pause and just be. My daughter absolutely loves climbing trees and making dens. We have friends down for a night and go collecting sloes. There are lovely walks, fishing at Stockbridge and a pub in the village with an old skittle alley.’