Country Life

There are parts of Oxfordshire that are so dripping with money, privilege and inherited self-assurance that visiting them feels as if it is conditional on due deference and a humble demeanour. One such is the village of Great Tew, 10km east of Chipping Norton. Among a plethora of pretty ironstone villages, Great Tew has the most glowing stone, the most neatly trimmed thatch, the most ornately lintelled windows, the best topiary, several extra coats of Farrow and Ball, and driveways with lavender borders so long they converge to a single point.

For 170 years, the Great Tew estate, which incorporates most of the village property, was owned by the Boulton family. Matthew Boulton was an 18th century entrepreneur and engineer; he was one of the founding fathers of modern Birmingham and a gold statue of him stands in the city’s central square. A relative bought the estate in 1815, and it was administered in a conventional, patrician fashion until the then owner was killed in the WWI trenches. The estate fell into disrepair during the inter-war depression and eventually, in the 1950s (or early 60s), came into the hands of a distant scion of the Boultons, one Eustace Robb, who was a TV producer in the 1930s, eventually the director of television, and worked at Bletchly Park during WWII. Robb was not a traditional estate owner and relied heavily on his resident agent, James Johnston, under whose highly commercial management the estate has prospered financially

The facts of what happened next are that on Robb’s death in 1985, Johnston became the owner of the estate, and the family remain the current owners. Exactly how this came about is murky – there are details on the internet (and in print in a UK journal) that are definitely scandalous and potentially libellous. I’m not going to reproduce them here on on a public forum, given the depth of the pockets involved! Suffice to say that Emily Brontë would not need to invent much

In modern times, the estate has welcomed ‘Soho Farmhouse’, the country cousin of ‘Soho House’, a global private members club that caters to the A listers of the A list. Meghan Markle had her hen night here; the Beckhams are regulars and have a barn conversion down the road; Eddie Redmayne, Jemima Khan, Pixie Geldorf...the list is endless

The good news for us is that all this wealth helps support a nice little cafe in a village where it would not otherwise survive. Which means we can sneak in and sneak out, have a decent lunch, and not worry about the paparazzi

How did I end up writing about all that? I planned to write about the numinous experience of visiting a pretty country churchyard – just down the valley from Great Tew - where no church stood until the 10th or 11th century – really quite late. There, we found an Anglo-Saxon (or just possibly Viking) burial mound – a ‘hlaew’ – that has never been excavated. Its encirclement by a narrow ring of huge trees made it all the more uncanny, as did the lone raven patrolling the boundary and the empty windows of the huge deserted houses making up the hamlet. It has the feel of an ancient place. I think it shuns its neighbour's notoriety and does not want to be written about