The house is empty. Behind the heavy door of carved and iron-braced oak is a shadowed back hall floored in worn cobbles; beyond, a bay-windowed kitchen with an Aga cooker, a scullery with a low stone sink and larder, a dim wine cellar under the stairs. What sun there is slants through the windows of a long, stone-sided hall at the front of the house, a room the new owners have imagined as a playroom complete with an upright piano and wall-to-wall shelves of children’s books. There is a window seat and fireplace in the parlor; the plaster is crumbling beneath the wallpaper. Up the staircase, there are bedrooms and studies with views of the church and its yew and its toppling graveyard, views of the trio of giant wych elms shading the back quarter of the grounds, views of a tennis court overrun with vines and old roses. All the doors inside stand open.

Outside, a nine-foot wall of rough granite stones encircles the manor’s three acres. On the lane side, a driveway draws itself closed in a pitch-cobbled courtyard flanked by a barn, a stable, and a falling-down servants’ cottage. There are dahlias and snapdragons and spiking peach gladioli in the weedy flower beds; jasmine vines and dusty-leaved sweetpeas creeping over the vacant greenhouse. Nasturtiums and cornflowers have emerged under the twin laburnums, long past their saffron bloom; forget-me-nots grow rank beneath the boxwood bushes by the front door. The holly and lilac hedge framing the broad lawn belies the stinging nettles that have all but taken over the grass. Encroaching on the tennis court is a wild bramble of purpling blackberries, tight knots at the end of erect stems, dark tiny fists.

Under the sixty-foot elms is an ancient moated mound, all that remains of an Iron Age hill fortress. In spring, its sides and ramparts are blanketed with daffodils and narcissi, a sea of waving green and white and two-toned yellow that spreads through the sloping, grassy orchard.

In the front garden, the fruit from the few cherry trees is weeks out of season. But in the orchard four kinds of apples, eaters and cookers, are ripening. The poorly pruned branches of the apple trees are fully leafed out, the verdurous leaves waving faintly, turning palms up in the breeze; they shield the mostly undersized, embryonic fruit. The apples are hard, waxy finished, and woody, some still thumb-sized and puckered, with the exception of the Devonshire Quarrendens, the rarest and earliest apples in the orchard.