Country houses for sale

OnTheMarket

Dreamy properties in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty

Green and pleasant.

properties in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty

Kent, £1.295 million

Elphick’s Oast, a twin-oast and barn conversion off a country lane not far from the village of Goudhurst, in the High Weald AONB, dates from 1909. It was transformed in 1981 into a four-bedroom house. One of the roundel rooms is a library and there is also a balcony, Cornish-slate-paved terraces, woods and a 2.6-acre field. Savills (01580 720161; www.onthemarket.com)

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West Sussex, £2.6 million

Classic Regency Compton House is discreetly located at the centre of one of the South Downs National Park’s most coveted villages, within more than an acre of private walled gardens, including a kitchen garden. There are eight bedrooms and outbuildings include a former coach house, stabling and groom’s quarters, suitable for conversion. Jackson-Stops & Staff (01243 786316; countrylife.onthemarket.com)

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Hampshire, £1.25 million

In pretty Breamore, near Fordingbridge, in the Avon Valley, bridging the gap between the New Forest and the Cranborne Chase AONB, five-bedroom Willow & Marshgate enjoys unspoilt views over water meadows. Its recent renovation has preserved period features such as the inglenook fireplaces and flint walls. Winkworth (01722 443000; countrylife.onthemarket.com)

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North Yorkshire, £3.25 million

Believed to date from the 1600s, seven-bedroom The Old Rectory, Oswaldkirk, on the edge of the Howardian Hills and the North York Moors National Park, has a Georgian wing (which includes the kitchen and an orangery with French doors), a large York-stone terrace and walled gardens stretching to the south. There’s also a substantial bothy with a bar and stabling. Knight Frank (01423 530088; countrylife.onthemarket.com)

Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.