Shropshire Magazine

Spartan living accommodation will help transport holidaymakers back in time!

The Shropshire Magazine gets a preview of a holiday home with a difference – one which is assured of plenty of publicity when it is the focus of a BBC television series

The cottage exterior.

An authentic farm labourer’s cottage in Shropshire, carefully restored to retain its original 19th-century condition, is to be one of the ‘stars’ of a new BBC television series about Victorian living.

Henley Cottage is set in a picturesque landscape, unchanged for more than two centuries, on the privately owned Acton Scott Estate in the South Shropshire Hills.

And the cottage is set to become available to rent for the first time from next April as a rural holiday escape, for those in search of a simpler way of life.

The property offers visitors the rare opportunity to enjoy an old way of life in a homely atmosphere, living as a farm labourer would have done in the 19th century – albeit for just a few days at a time.

It is one of a number of period buildings featured in a forthcoming BBC2 TV series about Victorian living, filmed on the Acton Scott Estate between August 2007 and August 2008, and due to be screened next year.

Rupert Acton, who manages the Acton Scott Estate and conceived the idea, said: “Henley Cottage aims to appeal to those who would like a bit of an adventure! If you are searching for something a bit more grounding – water pumped by hand from a well instead of turning a tap; candlelight and oil lamps, not illumination at the flick of switch – this is for you. Children will love participating and learning from their experience here; certainly my own three-year-old daughter already has, by picking the wild flowers that grow around it!”

Filming under way for the BBC series.

On arrival, holiday guests will be given detailed instructions on how to use the cottage’s domestic bygones. This includes the Victorian coal-fired kitchen range for heating water and cooking on, a pantry for storing food and the fireside hip-bath for bathing.

Henley Cottage has original quarry tile and oak floors, mullion windows, wrought-iron bedsteads with comfortable horsehair mattresses, traditional linen sheets, wool blankets, soft feather pillows and huckaback linen towels. While the original earth closet at the end of the garden is in working order, the one concession to the 21st century is a modern WC and shower room with running hot water, which is located in an outhouse – for those that simply cannot cope without it.

Connect

Rupert Acton said: “It is my ambition to eventually introduce a small flock of hens and develop a vegetable-and-herb garden at Henley Cottage, so visitors may collect their own eggs and harvest their own food in season. It all sounds rather too good to be true, but I genuinely believe that the Acton Scott Estate is uniquely placed to offer holiday visitors the opportunity to connect with our rural heritage, by the experience of living as a 19th-century farm labourer might have done while staying at Henley Cottage!”

Because the cottage was never modernised, it was abandoned in the 1950s and remains a rare living example of the 19th-century country vernacular.

Consequently, it suited the needs of the production company for the BBC television series about Victorian rural life. Now that filming has ended, Rupert Acton has taken the opportunity to preserve and not destroy the evidence of the property’s humble origins. He explains: “This is a simple country cottage that has been left free of decorative embellishment while enjoying uninterrupted views across rolling pasture and woodland. Nothing is straight and the materials that make up the building, from the worn oak floorboards and ochre-coloured, lime-plastered walls to the wonky exterior chimney flue, are very much in evidence. I believe passionately in the need to keep alive traditional skills, conserve historic buildings and preserve the natural landscape. ”

Creature comforts at Henley Cottage include a hip-bath by the fire!

The BBC2 series, The Victorian Farm, features three historians who lived and worked on the site for a year as Victorian farmers would have done. They are archaeologists Alex Langlands, 31, and Peter Ginn, 30, who both studied at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and Ruth Goodman, a social historian focusing on the early modern period. She is a specialist in costume and domestic life, and has worked as a consultant for the Victoria & Albert museum and on films, including Shakespeare in Love.

The experiment began in September 2007, at the start of the agricultural year, when the team, dressed in period costume, prepared the fields with a horse-drawn plough and sowed a crop of wheat.

Victorian Farm at Acton Scott is portrayed in the series as the last of a dying breed, an old-fashioned mixed farm.

• A book of the trio’s experiences, Victorian Farm, is published by Pavilion Books (£20). For further information about the historic estate of Acton Scott, Henley Cottage and forthcoming courses, visit www.actonscott.com