Make Cothay while the sun shines

THIS week sees the launch—at a guide price of ‘offers over £5 million’ through Knight Frank in Exeter (01392 848824) —of Grade I-listed Cothay Manor and its magical gardens near Wellington, Somerset, described by Christopher Hussey of COUNTRY LIFE (October 29, 1927) as ‘the most perfect small 15th-century country house that survives in the kingdom’. Looking ‘as though it had been moulded by thick fingers out of the soil’, the manor sits behind its own fishpond among the meadows and woods of the Vale of Taunton, little more than five miles from junction 27 of the M5 motorway.

Hussey attributes Cothay’s survival as a rare, if not unique example