Three of a kind

The beautiful North Wessex Downs are the leafy backdrop to three imposing country houses for sale

- Penny Churchill

THE surprisingly remote and tranquil landscape of the North Wessex Downs AONB, which straddles the boundaries of Berkshire, Hampshire, Oxford- shire and Wiltshire, is home to some of England’s loveliest, but least-known country houses and estates, most of which never make it onto the open market.

Thus, it’s all the more exciting to see the simultaneous launch onto the market of three fine Georgian-style houses, all three located along a 10-mile stretch of the Kennet valley in the south of the AONB, between the historic market towns of Newbury and Hungerford. Alex Barton of Strutt & Parker’s Newbury office (01635 521707) is handling the sale of two of them, the first being Grade II-listed The Old Rectory at Chilton Foliat on the West Berkshire/Wiltshire border, two miles north of Hungerford and 11 miles from Newbury, which comes to the market for the first time in 50 years, at a guide price of £5.95 million.

Screened from the village by a high brick and flint wall, the imposing, 9,500sq ft former rectory stands in some 11 acres of immaculate gardens and grounds that merge into the surrounding parkland, which belongs to the estate of which the Old Rectory was once a part. The house, which stands alongside the 12th-century Norman church of St Mary’s, dates, according to its listing, from the mid-18th century, with a late-18th-century wing incorporating an earlier, 17th-century, square structure of two storeys and an attic. A former 17th-century manor house to the west of the church was demolished in the 1750s.