IN THE MARKET

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19945, 1 November 1934, Page 7

IN THE MARKET

ESTATES OF BRITISH DUKES

UPKEEP TOO COSTLY Two or three dukes are trying to dispose of properties of considerable value and historic note, and the cause is partly the pressure of taxation in one form or another, and partly a weariness at the increasing degree of interference with the liberty of landowners to do what they like with their own (says a writer in the “Daily Mail”). Town and country planning arbitrary regulations as to the areas that may be used for certain crops, building bylaws, and similar restrictions, have made the management of a large landed estate costly and troublesome. A feature of the lists of landed estates awaiting tenants or purchasers is that many of them recall military and naval achievements at various critical periods of English history. The Duke of Marlborough is selling Lowesby Hall, near Melton Mowbray, a property with a history going back as far as the days when its owners went forth to Palestine as Crusaders. The late duke’s executors are selling his town mansion in Carlton House Terrace and the furniture. Fifty Gardeners The Duke of Wellington wishes to let on a long lease Ewhurst Park, his Surrey seat, with two square miles of shooting, and he has sold, or is selling, in London salerooms, a great deal of fine furniture and works of art. The Duchess of Northumberland has intimated her readiness to accept a rent of £6B 5s a week for Albury Park, near Guildford. The records of that well-known Surrey seat go back to the year 1040. The rent includes the wages of gardeners, a heavy item, for as many as fifty are kept on some large estates, such as Aldenham. at Elstree, another house that has lately been offered, but is now a country club. Other famous houses await buyers or tenants, among them Brooksby, the Melton Mowbray hunting-box of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty. This fine old mansion, much enlarged about forty years ago, is known to many sailors who stayed there when it was a war hospital, and they will recall the delightful gardens which were so lavishly laid out by the late Lady Beatty. Sporting estates of vast acreage, in the best shooting country in England —that part of Suffolk between Thetford and Bury St. Edmunds—are changing hands. Two of the largest, Lackford Manor and, for the Cadogan trustees, the 11.000 acres of the late Lord Cadogan’s Culford estate, have just been sold, the buyers being represented by a Bournemouth agency. Another notable Suffolk shooting, with a good mansion, Cavenham Park, Bury St. Edmunds, can be taken on a tenancy at a merely nominal rent, as the owner, Brigadier-General Home, is going abroad for the winter. Disappearing In Kent the last traces of the very exclusive social circle that dominated the county one hundred years ago are disappearing, an impending sale of Evington Park recalls the Honeywoods, who were friends of Jane Austen. She lived at Godmersham Park, a neighbouring estate that has been broken up, and the mansion, with the park only, has been lately to let. The vast estate of the Dering family, near Ashford, has gone into many hands, and the mansion is used as a school; and another seat that Jane Austen knew well, at Mersham-le-Hatch, has been to let.

Nearer London, 5000 acres of Lullingstone Castle land at Swanley have passed from the Hart Dyke family into the hands of purchasers who are developing it for villas. Fishing rights seem as difficult as shooting to dispose of at the moment, two or three of the best-known properties, with long stretches of that famous river the Test, having failed to find buyers under the hammer. Another estate, in Surrey, wholly given up to trout fishing, lingers in the market, though upon it exists an organised and flourishing concern, the Enton Trout Fishers’ Club, with an annual subscription of £52 10s.