If walls could talk

Two castles, one in England and one in Scotland, offer history, escapism and a touch of the unexpected

- Penny Churchill

SAM GIBSON, who heads up Scottish agent Galbraith’s new North of England office, based at Hexham (01434 405975), has hit the ground running with the launch onto the market of the ‘wildly romantic’, Grade I-listed Coupland Castle, near Wooler, Northumberland, which is for sale jointly with Strutt & Parker (01670 898711) at a guide price of £1.9 million.

Unseen from any public road, it stands in 25 acres of gardens, paddocks and woodland traversed by the River Glen and adjoining the extensive Lanton estate— an idyllic setting presided over by the rolling Cheviot Hills to the south.

The sale follows the death, in October last year, of antique dealer and restorer Robin Jell, who bought the rambling historic building in 1979 and restored it over the years. He filled its many rooms with antiques and a large collection of pictures painted by his mother, the watercolourist Pauline Konody, and his maternal grandmother Isabel Codrington, who worked in oils—both exhibited widely during the 1920s and 1930s.

Although known as a castle, Coupland is in fact a late tower house, built of softly coloured volcanic rock with buff-sandstone dressings in three or four stages. It was the last fortified building to be constructed on the border in the late 1580s or early 1590s, following the recommendation of a Border Commission that a chain of forts be built to protect the frontier from marauding Scots.