The Landmark Trust - add a different dimension to your holiday

Spending a holiday in an usual or historic building can add a different dimension to a break away from home.

You become immersed in the history and sense of the place and can find yourself enjoying buildings that normally you would never be able to visit let alone stay in.

Thanks to The Landmark Trust, founded in 1965 by the late Sir John Smith and Lady Smith, such a holiday is now a reality. Landmark is a charity that rescues historic buildings, restores them and saves them from neglect and then lets them for holidays. Since its foundation, the charity has saved and restored 190 Landmarks, not only bringing them to new life through restoration and preservation but at the same time providing a unique holiday experience so that others can enjoy them also.

All the Landmarks are remarkable in some way for their architecture, history or setting and many are situated within historic and pleasant grounds and gardens. There are follies, castles, forts, towers and cottages as well as other unusual buildings.

The income derived from people staying in the buildings pays for their ongoing maintenance and Landmark runs an active fund-raising programme to ensure that it is able to continue rescuing buildings at risk. Recently, they completed the acquisition of Llwyn Celyn, a Grade I late fifteenth-century hall house in the Brecon Beacons National Park, considered the most at risk inhabited house in Wales. With the aid of grants from Cadw and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Landmark was able to acquire the house.

Being able to restore and maintain historic buildings and landscapes sensitively is never an easy task and Landmark is careful to plan for a building’s future. Landmark is well aware that sometimes they have to respond to the unpredictable and to this end have set up The Landmark Fund to provide for those times when some unexpected and unforeseen pressing project might arise.

Gardening enthusiasts have a wide choice of properties set in delightful landscapes and gardens. For example, Cavendish Hall, a Regency country house, set in a small well-timbered park on the outskirts of a timeless village deep in Constable country, offers a chance to experience life in a house such as Jane Austen might have known.

The Georgian House at Hampton Court Palace, offers the sense of a secret life beyond the public gaze. The main rooms are handsome and there is a delightful private walled garden into which the morning sun shines.

The Old Parsonage at Oxford conveys the strong impressions of a parson's life in former days. In the parlour you can sit and look out down the garden as did the scholarly leisured parson, pondering his sermon as he watched the Thames slide by.

For me, one destination I have high on my list is Goddards, (pictured left) built by Lutyens from 1898-1900 and enlarged by him in 1910. It is considered one of his most important early houses, designed in traditional Surrey style, with a garden laid out in collaboration with Gertrude Jekyll. Apparently built as a “Home of rest, to which ladies of small means might repair for holiday”, it was commissioned by Frederick Mirrielees, a wealthy businessman who married an heiress of the Union Castle shipping line. Leased to The Landmark Trust by The Lutyens Trust, it is once again a place to repair for holidays. The National Trust guard the surrounding woodland and country landscape, wherein sits brick and tile villages concealing many masterpieces of the Arts and Crafts movement. Heaven!

In 2012 four new Landmarks open to the public. Astley Castle, in Warwickshire, two at The Shore Cottages at Berriedale and at The Warren House at Kimbolton in Cambridgeshire, where a seventeenth-century vernacular warrener’s cottage has been transformed.

Some properties are just for two people, others for twelve or more. Some are surrounded by open countryside or a landscaped garden, others lie in the heart of historic cities. Inside each property you will find furniture carefully chosen to fit with the surroundings.

The Landmark Trust has an excellent website – www.landmarktrust.org.uk - but to fully appreciate the variety of holiday lets on offer, The Landmark Trust Handbook is worth purchasing. For £10 plus p&p, you receive a book which is a treasure in itself, providing a useful guide for planning a Landmark holiday with lots of property information.

To book log onto: - www.landmarktrust.org.uk  - or telephone: 01628 825925

Picture Credits: (1) The Georgian House, (2) Goddards © The Landmark Trust