Lands Of Hope And Glory

Could these two historic houses galvanise the market into action?

- Penny Churchill

THE recent launch onto the market of several of the UK’s most inspiring country houses and estates has sent a rare thrill of excitement through the ranks of estate agents and buyers alike.

Setting the pace, at a guide price of ‘excess £12 million’ through Knight Frank’s country department (020–7861 1078), is glorious, Grade I-listed Dewlish house at Dewlish, near Milborne St Andrew, one of Dorset’s most beautiful country houses. It’s being sold— together with its surrounding 296-acre estate—for the first time in 57 years and only the second time since it was built.

The picturesque hamlet of Dewlish is scattered over the western slopes of the valley of the Devil’s Brook in the heart of Dorset’s hardy Country, 2½ miles from Milborne St Andrew and eight miles from the county town of Dorchester. According to the Rev hutchins’s seminal history of Dorset, it was here, on the site of a large Roman villa, that Thomas Skinner built Dewlish house in the Queen Anne/Georgian style in about 1702.

The design blends the characteristics of both periods in its main front of Purbeck stone, its south-east end wall of ham hill ashlar and its south-west front of brick. The north-west end wall is more modern, having been added since the removal of an 18thand 19th-century service wing sometime in the 20th century.

Skinner died in 1756 and was buried in nearby Winterborne Stickland church, rather than Dewlish’s parish church of All Saints,as he would have preferred. Local legend has it that his ghost has often been seen in Stickland church, where he knocks books off the altar and generally makes his disgruntled presence felt.