Curious connections

The walls of these storied properties have quite the tales to tell

- Penny Churchill

LOCATED on high ground overlooking the Thames between Marlow and Maidenhead, east Berkshire, Grade II listed The Mount in Spring Lane, Cookham Dean, is an imposing, mainly late-Victorian country house set in 3½ acres of gardens and grounds. It is probably best known for its association with the author Kenneth Grahame, whose boyhood memories of life there reputedly inspired his children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. It is now on the market, for the first time in 54 years, at a guide price of £4 million through Savills in Windsor (01753 834600).

In 1864, following his wife’s untimely death, Grahame’s father moved to France and their son, aged four, was sent to live with his grandmother at The Mount, where he remained for three years until the chimney collapsed and he had to move out. A solitary child, he was introduced to the riverside by his uncle, David Ingles, who was a curate at Cookham Dean church. As an adult, he returned to live at Cookham Dean from 1906–08, during which time The Wind in the Willows was edited and published.

The next well-known owners of The Mount were the London diamond brokers Alexander and Arthur Levy, whose firm arranged the cutting by Asshers of Amsterdam of the famous Cullinan Diamond, the world’s largest, which was presented by the South African government to Edward VII on his 66th birthday in November 1907. The Levy brothers transformed the house, originally built in the late 1500s as a hunting lodge on the edge of Windsor Great Park, into the present, typically Victorian country house, with its prominent gables, bell tower and chimneys.