Hankering after alife in the countryside? Don’t leave home without our expert guide for house-hunters
It was mid-February 2021 and we were deep in lockdown. But one of the few things you could do was visit properties on the market.
For a number of reasons, we’d decided to leave the Chilterns. The Friday night ritual of a glass of wine and RightMove led to a “shortlist” of 120 country houses. Because I didn’t need to be in London for work, we could look anywhere. We started off sensibly – Kent, West Sussex, Wiltshire. Then we started to go a bit crazy: Herefordshire, Shropshire, Derbyshire.
Finally, I went completely mad and inputted “Scottish Borders” into the search bar. I’ve no idea why: I’d never visited the place, only passed through on the way to Edinburgh. True, my wife’s father was from Musselburgh, just outside Edinburgh – but he had left in the 1960s, vowing never to return (nor did he). And yet – for someone used to south-east England house prices, I was astonished by what you could get in south-east Scotland. There was one particular house that caught our eye. Could we…? Might we…?
The drive – from Buckinghamshire to Berwickshire – was 350 miles each way. Per lockdown rules, you couldn’t stay overnight or eat in a pub. The round trip took 12 hours. We spent 20 minutes at the property, an 1840s farmhouse just outside the village of Coldingham, then turned for home. Before we reached Berwick-upon-Tweed, we had decided to make an offer.
This decision was impulsive and romantic. We didn’t want a major project. Abbey Park House was in pretty good nick. The main work involved reinstating the interiors (and making it rather less bling). We thought we’d be downsizing, but we ended up with five bedrooms and more than three acres of land, a barn, stables, orchard and meadow.
We moved on the longest day of 2021. Acouple of weeks later, a friend visited and we stayed up until the wee hours. As I was putting the bottles out at 1am, I realised it was the first time I’d seen night here (with a scattering of stars visible to the naked eye). Of course, there are the long winter nights – but that first winter wasn’t too punishing (apart from Storm Arwen leaving us without power for five days).
The house is a ten-minute walk to the village and another ten to a sheltered, sandy beach. Coldingham has a couple of pubs and a burn – a sleepy thing most of the time, turning into a torrent during a storm. There is a ruined 12th-century priory and a sandstone Victorian church. The bay, sheltered and ringed with colourful beach huts and dunes, has a high, grassy knoll at
