The question of how to make a place your own preoccupies most newly installed homeowners. But what do you do when the house you’ve moved into was really someone’s? Walnut Tree Farm, in the Suffolk village of Mellis, is one such place – and Jasmin and Titus Rowlandson were faced with exactly that quandary when they moved in 17 years ago.
The Elizabethan farmhouse had belonged to Roger Deakin, the charismatic nature writer, author of Waterlog and something of a cult figure, generally considered the founding father of the wild-swimming movement. He was also their friend Rufus’s dad and utterly beloved of them both. They had both visited Walnut Tree Farm since they were teenagers, “roaming free, larking around, building huts and the like,” says Titus, a restorer of Alfa Romeos and author (with Rufus) of a book about the house. Its ragged hedgerows, sun-sparkled moat and off-grid sheds and wagons formed the tangled landscape of their wild and well-spent youth.
“The house and Rog were intertwined in many ways,” says Jasmin, an artist. “It was his muse.” He had bought it as a wreck in the early 1970s and, over the years, built it back up by hand, using any bits of salvage he could get his hands on, clearing the spring-fed moat for swimming, and writing ceaselessly. The farm is the locus of some of his most romantic pieces of prose – enchanting, enchanted, intense and mystical. “My house was once an acorn,” he once wrote of this treasured timber-framed dwelling.
