Shhhhhh...

THERE is great delight to be had poring over the front pages of COUNTRY LIFE each week, dreaming of what life would be like in a Scottish castle (so reasonably priced, but do bear in mind the midges) or a townhouse in London’s Eaton Square (worth a king’s ransom, but, oh dear, the traffic) or perhaps that cottage in the Cotswolds (if you don’t mind standing next to Hollywood A-listers in the queue at Daylesford). The estate agent’s particulars will give you details of acreage, proximity to schools and railway stations, but never—no, never—an indication of noise levels.

- Alan Titchmarsh

You can pay double-figure millions for your rural dream house, but—unless it really is that castle in the Highlands—the chances are that the thing you will be unlikely to acquire at any price is… silence.

A well-known stately pile in my part of Hampshire has been on the market for some years now. It fulfils all the requirements of someone seeking a country estate in terms of accessibility to London, rolling parkland peppered with handsome clumps of oak trees, the obligatory cedars of Lebanon, cottages for the staff and such like, but one prospective purchaser did not even get as far as the Palladian portico. He stepped out of his helicopter, listened to the hum of the nearby M3, turned on his heel and took off in search of a more peaceful neck of the woods.