HEADY DAYS: Lathom in Lancashire. Once the finest palladian house in the county. In 1925, the earl who owned it was forced to sell to pay off his debts. The buyer demolished the main block of the house and felled all the trees. Reproduced by permission of English Heritage/NMR

The massive popularity of ITV’s Downton Abbey costume drama has rekindled our fascination with country estates. Their stories haven’t been champagne and sunshine all the way, though. In fact, many estates have fallen by the wayside, as STEVEN RUSSELL discovers

THE LAST SQUIRE: Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey in his den in the stables of Thirkleby Hall, Yorkshire. He was an expert on the crossbow. The site of the hall is now a caravan park. Reproduced by permission of English Heritage/NMR

FOR a symbol of how life can change dramatically in not that long a period of time, we can’t do better than Hilton Park in Staffordshire. What were once the grounds of a sweeping country estate now host a motorway service station off the M6 – offering refreshment and diversion from the likes of Burger King, Costa Coffee, Phonebitz and Ladbrokes. Amazingly, the 18th Century mansion house of Hilton Hall has survived. For about a dozen years it was a corporate HQ for Tarmac and is now an office and business centre. It’s all a far cry from the days when the first winner of the Derby horse-race was bred and trained there.

Then there’s the Cassiobury estate. Park in suburban Watford and you could be leaving your car on ground that – until the 1930s – was rolling parkland. It used to belong to the earls of Essex, but was infected by urban growth and is now covered largely by semi-detached houses.

Hilton Park and Cassiobury haven’t been alone in falling victim to change. Over the past century, more than a third of England’s landed estates have been sold and broken up. Ancient woodlands have been cut down to make money from the timber and old houses demolished. Cricket grounds, deer parks and even farms have ended up under concrete – replaced by those housing estates, airports, power stations and the like. At best, the land might survive as a managed pine forest or a golf course.

Classical landscapes and architectural gems have been wiped away for ever, often exchanged for a military base, a soulless reservoir (the Normanton estate lies beneath Rutland Water) or an anonymous sprawl of industrial units. Deepdene in Surrey is honoured only by an ugly office block.

CHRONICLE: Felling the Ancient Oaks, by John Martin Robinson

You can almost hear architectural historian John Martin Robinson shedding a tear – tears of anger, really – in his new book Felling the Ancient Oaks, officially out at the end of this coming week.

In it, he tells the stories of 20 of England’s lost estates – from the aristocratic families that founded them and the impetus of the halcyon days to the reasons behind their terminal decline.

Sometimes, it was extravagance and incompetence that ruined fortunes and brought an end to the salad days. Others were poisoned by that creep of suburbia, or the force of industrial development – even coal-mining.

There’s one Suffolk “ghost” in the book: the estate at Fornham St Genevieve, less than a couple of miles north of Bury St Edmunds, that was the seat of the Kent family from 1731 to 1797 and the Gilstraps from 1842 to 1950. Today, some of the parkland is home to a golf course, hotel and spa – a symbol of the importance of leisure, health and beauty to many folk in the 21st Century.

CALM: Fornham 'was a perfect example of a medium-sized "new" Georgian estate'. By permission of Bury St Edmunds Past and Present Society.

John Martin Robinson explains how the estate became the perfect example of a medium-sized estate, with a good house, neat village, a collection of large arable farms and a lovely landscaped park.

The Fornham lands used to belong to 
the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, then went to Sir Thomas Kytson of Hengrave Hall – “a Tudor ‘new man’, a rich mercer [a dealer in textiles and other goods] and merchant adventurer of the City of London, who was one of the king’s executors and beneficiaries”.

It later became an independent estate and was bought by Southwark grain merchant and distiller Samuel Kent in 1731. It became the family’s country seat and Samuel became an MP and High Sheriff of Suffolk.

His son-in-law, Sir Charles, inherited the pile in 1760 and commissioned James Wyatt to revamp the house. (The architect was at the same time working at Heveningham Hall, in east Suffolk – for another wealthy merchant clan.) The result was “a handsome new house, with a plain, dignified exterior and beautifully-stuccoed neo-Classical interiors”.

GLORIOUS: The sun catches the front of Fornham Hall behind a grand cedar tree. By permission of Bury St Edmunds Past and Present Society.

The estate was later bought by Bernard Howard, who preferred it to Arundel 
Castle even after becoming the Duke of Norfolk. Howard made the house at Fornham bigger and added new stables and farm buildings.

It was enlarged again in the second half of the 19th Century under William Gilstrap, when there was an agricultural boom . . . and then went into decline.

The estate was requisitioned by the War Department in 1939. “A large military camp, with hutments on concrete foundations, was built in the park and at Hall Farm, and the main house was knocked about and neglected,” explains John Robinson.

Looking at the place about four years later, he suggests, then-owner Captain Duncan MacRae (grandson of Sir William) cannot have imagined a bright future.

A GOOD PLAN: The landscaping of the park at Fornham made particularly-effective use of cedar trees - 'always a sign of civilisation', says the book Felling the Ancient Oaks. By permission of Bury St Edmunds Past and Present Society.

Effectively a liability, “it was typical of the houses and estates given up in the 1950s as a direct result of wartime requisitioning and damage”.

It must have been heartbreaking to see it put up for sale in 1950: 2,400 acres that included the Georgian mansion, the parkland with its lake and fine timber (and “still full of Nissen huts and other military detritus”), three farms, gardens and glasshouses, three other residences, and the village with 60 cottages, a post office and Woolpack Inn. Annual rental income was put at “only” £4,000, however.

History went under the hammer at The Athenaeum in Bury St Edmunds on October 25. The house failed to tempt a buyer and was knocked down in 1957, “seven years after the surrounding estate was sold off in bits”.

John Robinson is convinced Fornham’s main house could easily have been adapted and saved for 20th Century living.

Also, sales and subsequent re-sales of parts of the estate – such as Park Farm – show “how viable the whole estate could have been, had it weathered the war 
years and their depressing aftermath, but the owner could not foresee the future in 1950”.

Overall, the author argues that the loss of so many of England’s landed estates is a matter for deep regret, and more – “areas which have lost their historic estates, such as west Cumberland or swathes of Wales, have suffered damage to their landscape and their economic prosperity.

“The current danger in the twenty-first century is that too commercial and speculative an approach to management – rather than neglect and ruin or political interference and high taxes, as was the case in the last century – risks wrecking the landed estate.

“Much has been lost . . . which could have played a significant economic and cultural role in contemporary life, while helping to balance and mitigate the peculiarly hideous and irredeemable quality of provincial urban existence in modern England.”

Felling the Ancient Oaks: How England Lost its Great Country Estates is published by Aurum Press Ltd at £30