Country Mouse

Riviera. But, even this far away from London, there are enough one-percenters to create a booming business.

Is it a crime now to be aspirational? The Tories are doing their best by overtaxing us to kill ambition. But mine is to own my own detached stone house in Dorset in my eventide years.

It was nice to get into our Airbnb property. At home, every door has swollen in the rain and our carpenter assured us with typical Wiltshire logic that the best way to deal with doors that won’t open or close is do nothing. ‘Don’t shave them or sand them down – just wait until they dry out.’

Wiltshire is a huge county, and the part of it that lies south of the notorious A303, with its famous bottlenecks, resembles Dorset.

Suddenly, streetlights and UPVC windows become rarities and noble trees like Atlas cedar, Douglas fir and Wellingtonia dot the Elysian Fields.

I have a thing about Dorset. I think it might suit me better than Wiltshire. H J Massingham, the expert on England’s downland, claimed the Dorset Downs ‘give a warmer welcome than those of Wilts’ – maybe because they’re just that bit further from London.

Our older friend Anne believes that you need to be at least 100 miles from London for a place to have its own atmosphere, without the blight of excess weekenders importing their own atmospheres.

Recently driving through Dorset’s untamed and unmanicured Cranborne Chase, I observed fallen trees, left in situ to nourish the landscape, in contrast to what happens in other counties, where posses of under-gardeners will instantly descend to chainsaw them into discs for the Big House.

Behold the Boastagram pages of architectural and interior designer Ben Pentreath featuring his own Dorset idyll, which he clearly favours above all the other landscapes of perfection he posts from his globetrotting lifestyle. What a work/life balance.

I sigh heavily when I see photographs of gardener Anna Pavord’s 18-acre Dorset arcadia. She too once lived in Wiltshire. It would have suited me to have been born in Dorset 50 years earlier than I was. Then I could have made pilgrimages to the home of the late environmentalist Kenneth Allsop, to Chideock to meet writer brothers John, Llewelyn and Theodore Powys, or supreme woodengraver Reynolds Stone, who designed the coat of arms on our UK passports –underappreciated names now but giants of their time.

A huge number of Dorset houses are made of stone – not brick like my own squat dwelling in Wiltshire. The county has a generous stock of the prettiest houses England can offer. None more so than the silvery 1633 Stafford House near Dorchester which glints in the sunshine and is the seat of Lady and Lord Fellowes of Downton. Magnanimous hosts, and patrons to resting actors and artists, the Felloweses allegedly let no man be turned away –not even distressed gentlefolk like me.

Mary was keen to crack the whip over my commission to produce nine illustrations for a forthcoming book. She therefore wanted to get me away from my ‘garden’. Some artists will work only to a deadline. So, to avoid wasting time packing and assembling documents – a well-known displacement activity among creatives – she booked an Airbnb, exactly one hour south of our cottage, one mile from the Dorset border, and a stone’s throw from the agreeable hostelry the Beckford Arms with its roaring log fires and locally sourced ingredients.

Even in lashing rain in the bleakest, most stuttering days of the forthcoming agricultural year, we were advised to book. This is Wiltshire, not the Italian

The Airbnb superhost turned out to be the son of Reynolds Stone. He told me that Reynolds, who grew up at Eton, where his father and grandfather were masters, yearned, after childhood visits to Dorset, to live there permanently. He succeeded, buying the Georgian Old Rectory at Litton Cheney in 1953, for £8,000. A thickly wooded five acres had a wild romantic atmosphere, animated by crystal-clear springs that burst from fern-fringed hollows in the hillside.

Stone found all the spiritual nourishment he needed in his own immediate parish. He shunned London and abroad as well as shunning modernism, and instead embraced the English pastoral tradition.

Parish is a bond word: a covenant with place. It requires courage to be parochial, according to Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, as the word has a painful double edge, epitomising insularity and selfcontainment. Stone developed a local attachment, but he was not a ‘parochial’ artist any more than Samuel Palmer was.

We have been 30 years in Wiltshire and, as I say to Mary, ‘It’s time to let someone else take on the challenge of a derelict property – let’s go for a stonebuilt gatehouse on the edge of a Dorset estate. Then there would be someone to keep an eye on us when we have falls.’

‘I’d love you to move to Dorset,’ she replied. ‘But I’m very happy here – so I won’t be joining you.’