Cotswolds, without the crowds
Laura Moon is settling into her new home, Marston Hill Farm at Marston St Lawrence, Northamptonshire, with her husband, Richard, four-year-old daughter Isabella and twins Charles and Alexandra, aged two. “Will I get a dog?” she says. “Absolutely. We are just starting out on country life.” Surrounded by a large estate, they have sheep grazing in their paddock and deer running across their land. She is in love with their new life. “It is such a pretty part of the world, on the edge of Cotswolds. The children aren’t riding yet but I’m sure they will. Northamptonshire offers so much. We have only been here a short time but we realise there is so much to do and the villages are beautiful. It is rural life in the raw. Our butcher delivers venison to our front door. One morning the local hunt crashed through our paddock.” It is like living in the pages of Country Life. Marston Hill Farm is a lovely Grade II-listed farm of fudge-coloured stone with a party barn, swimming pool, cottage and outbuildings. Richard works in finance and commutes to London by train from Banbury to Marylebone. He has already been invited on several shoots, they have been to lots of dinner parties and Isabella has joined a smart weekend ballet school in Brackley. Laura is on to something because, as anyone in-the-know will tell you, Northamptonshire is greatly underrated. It is much better value than its neighbours Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire. According to Knight Frank, which sold them Marston Hill Farm, the average house price is £150,634, compared with £273,047 and £202,328 across the respective borders. Fields unfold and villages huddle between, but it doesn’t attract the tourists like the Cotswolds do. “If you don’t have something that pulls you in this direction, like a job or a family, then you don’t think of it. You have to stumble on it,” says Rachel Johnstone, search agent with Stacks (01594 842880; stacks-northamptonshire.co.uk). Last year, south Northamptonshire jumped 27 places to third in the country in the Halifax Quality of Life Survey. The reason people dismiss it is that they are put off by industrial centres such as Northampton, Daventry, Wellingborough and Corby, sitting like spiders in webs of ring roads and roundabouts. But the industrial stuff was laid over a pastoral landscape steeped in history. It was called a county of “spires and squires” because it was full of country seats and fine old churches. Rachel says Northampton is a goahead city which is compact enough to get in and out of quickly, and which has a new station. Theatregoers can get their cultural hit there or slip across the border to Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire to catch the Royal Shakespeare Company. 1 Sulgrave 2 Culworth 3 Blakesley 4 Everdon 5 The Bringtons 6 Church Brampton 7 Spratton 8 Cottesbrooke 9 Guilsborough 10 Byfield There are commuters but it isn’t a dormitory. “There are very strong village communities and people around through the day working on the land,” she says. “The presence of big estates means that traditional jobs haven’t disappeared. In my own village of Byfield there is so much life. You can be out with the children at cricket and football matches, listening to the church bells ringing, popping into the pub or shop or church. It is ridiculously idyllic.” The great houses include Althorp, the Grade I-listed seat of the Earls of Spencer, where the Diana, Princess of Wales memorial stands on an island surrounded by water lilies. Boughton, the home of the Dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry, was a location for the estate of Marius in the 2012 film Les Misérables; Cottesbrooke Hall is supposed to have been the inspiration for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; and Rockingham Castle, which dates back to William the Conqueror, was often visited by Charles Dickens, who probably based Chesney Wold in Bleak House on it. All of which tells us that there is plenty of old money in Northamptonshire, and old country ways with foxes and hounds in the Grafton and Pytchley hunts. “It doesn’t have the same cachet as other counties but its communications are second to none,” says Quentin Jackson-Stops of Jackson-Stops & Staff. “You can go east to Milton Keynes and it is 35 minutes into Euston, or catch the train from Banbury to Marylebone, or Kettering to St Pancras, which takes 50 minutes.” Northamptonshire’s golden triangle, full of houses built of honeyed Horton stone, lies between Daventry, Banbury and Towcester. As you move northward the stone develops a blue-grey tinge and house prices drop. The star is Oundle on the northern border, a virtuoso Georgian stone town, home of Oundle public school, full of pubs and coffee shops. “In the Cotswolds,” says Quentin, “you get houses built on the profits of the wool merchants but here, because of the big estates, you don’t find those. You are more likely to get a nice farmhouse or an old rectory. Also, people who move here tend to have a reason to come. They aren’t just buying a weekend cottage. They come to stay.”