Natural beauty

ife moves to a different beat in Ilmington, a village of honey-coloured stone cottages and quiet back lanes; a place in which neighbours know each other and a sense of community thrives. Geoff Davies’ cottage, Meadow View, is seemingly one of the village’s more ‘modern’ dwellings, with its smart brick Victorian frontage. Yet the stonework extending behind the property hints that the history of the building is not as straightforward as it might seem. ‘The cottage was actually relocated: it’s one-and-a-half sides of a house that used to stand elsewhere,’ he explains. ‘In 1860, somebody bought it and moved it to where we are now. They used all the stone at the back of the house and built a posh brick frontage: back then the bricks would have been more expensive than stone.’