Charm of the uncluttered east

An estate home as rare as hen's teeth and the stables of a legendary horse breeder are some of the highlights of the market this week

- Penny Churchill

LOCATED on the north Norfolk coast between the fishing port of Wellsnext-the-Sea and the sailing centre of Burnham Overy Staithe, the tiny village of Holkham was once a landing with access to the sea via a tidal creek to the harbour at Wells. Following the arrival of the pioneering Coke family in the early 1700s, the land around the creek was gradually reclaimed from the sea to form part of the now 25,000acre Holkham estate, a thriving farming, tourism and property business, the avowed aim of which is to be ‘the UK’s most pioneering and sustainable rural estate’.

The beating heart of the estate is Grade I- listed Holkham Hall, a grand Palladian mansion built for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, between 1734 and 1735, and now the home of the 8th Earl, who has inherited the Coke family’s passion for conservation, farming, forestry and gamekeeping, with the maintenance of the estate’s diverse landscape of farmland, woodland, parkland, saltmarsh and coastline. It includes the 9,600-acre Holkham National Nature Reserve, which is managed jointly with Natural England. It all makes for an idyllic coastal landscape that has been described as ‘a balm for the soul’.