Reaching towards the horizon

WE wanted a landscape garden, something that framed the house and would, in that old-fashioned phrase, create a series of rooms through which one could walk for five or 10 or 20 or 30 minutes.’ Mark Cecil is describing the vision he and his wife, Katie, had for Priors Marston. They had never intended to move to Warwickshire, but the late-Georgian manor seemed to have them in its sights. In 2001, a year after Mrs Cecil first spotted it in the pages of this magazine (and rejected it for being too far from London), the agents wrote to say it was still on the market. That time, they decided to drive up to have a look for themselves—and bought it that same