It has no crime, full employment, cheap housing... and is owned by the lord of the manor. So is this the perfect English village?



Aside from the cows, there isn't much in the way of traffic here. There is a bus service, but it comes only once a week and goes as far as the bright lights of Blandford Forum. If you find yourself here for no reason, you are well and truly lost.

The traditional cliche for pretty little villages such as this is 'sleepy'. But there's nothing bleary-eyed about the Dorset backwater of Chettle.

This is a village which defies every statistic and market trend. It has zero unemployment. Its businesses are booming. It has no problem with outsiders buying up second homes - because they are simply not allowed. Rents are way below the market rate.

Chettle: Is this the perfect English village?

This is the village the credit crunch forgot. Young couples are not driven out by property prices and there are as many children (22) as there are pensioners.

Everyone knows everyone and crime is virtually non-existent. The last intruder was driven off by a lady pensioner with a pick-axe handle. So what is Chettle's secret? The answer is enough to make a sociologist or a Labour MP weep.

For the past 1,000 years, this entire village and all the land around it - every last square inch of it - have been owned and controlled by the lord of the manor. And that is just how everybody likes it.

Before World War II, many landed estates owned entire villages. But death duties and demographics changed all that.

Today, it is thought that there are fewer than a dozen villages still wholly in private hands - Edensor and Tissington in Derbyshire, Heydon in Norfolk and a handful in the West Country.

Chettle is particularly interesting, though, because it owes its survival to the determination of a few strong-minded women. And now, after spending the best part of 1,000 years in blissful obscurity, it suddenly finds itself the subject of a new book, The Enduring Village.

So I have come to explore this pretty backwater to see how a Victorian squirearchy survives in the 21st century. But I do not find any forelocks being tugged. Indeed, if there was a contest to find Britain's perfect village, this one would have to be a strong candidate.

'I suppose you could call it benevolent feudalism. It certainly works and long may it last,' says John Sansom, 64, a tenant farmer who runs the same 300-acre dairy farm in Chettle that his father ran before him.

'The Bourke family owns this place and no one has a problem with that, because if it wasn't for them, most of us wouldn't be here.'

Like any village of a certain age, Chettle has a rich history of colourful characters, ups and downs, feuds and illicit liaisons (one former squire was a clergyman with three illegitimate children).

The Manor House: Chettle House is owned by Peter Bourke

But the similarities between Chettle and most other villages end there. All over rural Britain you find the same problems in village after village. First, the place becomes a target for retirees and second-home owners because it looks pretty. House prices rise and the younger generation has to head for the town.

Then, since everyone has a car to get to the supermarket, the village shop shuts down and, weekends aside, a ghostly atmosphere descends.

Chettle, on the other hand, is thriving. 'We have a very simple policy: we want people living here who have a good reason to be here, because that's what keeps it all going,' says Peter Bourke, 41, as we wander through the soaring hall of Chettle House, the magnificent Queen Anne mansion which stands at the heart of the estate.

It was Peter's great-great-aunt who saved this place from ruin and his grandmother who saved it all over again.

His aunt still runs the 1,200-acre estate, while Peter and his wife, Fiona, run the house.

In due course, Peter will inherit everything. But he is determined to run it all like the women before him.

'It's marriages that have saved this place,' he explains.

Since the mid-19th century, Peter's family - 'a perfect combination of lawyers, bankers and smugglers' - have controlled the village because they have owned every one of the 42 farms, cottages and flats here. And because the rents are a fraction of those charged by the other landlords in these parts, people are queuing up to become tenants.

Here, a pretty three-bedroom thatched cottage costs around £60 a week. On the open market, the same property would command £300 a week.

But it's not just a question of joining a housing waiting list. Priority for a home goes to anyone who works in the Chettle timberyard, the Chettle farms, the Chettle village shop or the Castleman Hotel (all owned by the Bourkes). After that, priority goes to anyone whose parents or grandparents lived in Chettle.

'Some families have lived here even longer than mine,' says 73-year-old Susan Favre (nee Bourke), Peter's aunt. She is the no-nonsense matriarch of the estate and general head of everything.

Chettle is full of beautiful old houses, but villagers pay only the minimum of rents

When a group of gipsies were spotted poaching in a field up the road, it was Susan who warned them off with a pick-axe handle. They have not been seen since.

Susan chooses the tenants - and evicts them, too. 'We expect people to live here. If they treat this place as a holiday home, then we won't let them stay. People need to live here to keep the shop and the whole community going.'

Of the eight villages in this area, Chettle is the only one with a shop - not bad for a place with a population of 90. And it's not just a well-stocked shop but a Post Office, too.

But much to Susan's fury, the Royal Mail want to shut down her Post Office counter and send villagers miles away to buy their stamps.

'Everyone will have to drive. So much for all that green rhetoric!' she snorts. A battle plan is being drawn up. It should be quite a battle. Equally unusual is the tiny 14th-century church. St Mary's - capacity 90 - is in tip-top condition. As lords of the manor, the Bourkes have the ancient right to appoint a vicar and they like to keep the church going.

Peter's father, Patrick, is the current lord of the manor, but also happens to be the organist. So the family grant a free house and telephone to a clergyman who will perform a service every Sunday.

'I originally came here for two years and, ten years later, I still can't believe how lucky I am,' says the Rev William Johnstone, 82, a retired missionary, as we dodge the sheep who are keeping the churchyard grass in order.

The church sits in the beautiful gardens of Chettle House with its lofty cedars, a picturesque grass tennis court and immaculate lawns.

Chettle has been owned and controlled by the Lord of the Manor for more than 1,000 years

But there is not a team of estate workers to keep it in order. When he is not working as a solicitor in Salisbury, Peter does all the gardening, ably assisted by Fiona and sons James, seven, and Sam, one.

It looks idyllic, but it is a hard grind to keep the place watertight and in the black. Peter and his family live in one part of the house while the rest is divided into five flats which are rented out to locals.

Fiona organises weddings, the couple belong to the Historic Houses Association and the house is open to the paying public on certain days. Some will recognise it as a location from the 2006 period drama film Amazing Grace.

When I drop by on a weekday evening, Peter has just dashed home from work to welcome the Blandford Forum Photography Club. Some of the visitors are a little surprised when the nice young couple serving the tea turn out to be the owners.

There is no 'them and us' in this village. It's all first-name terms, whether you are a Bourke or a bin man.

'If you are a landlord, you want your tenant to feel as if they own the place,' says Patrick Bourke, 71, who has recently retired to a converted stable block so that his son could take over the big house. 'If you lord it over people, they won't respect the property - or you.'

John Sansom is a typical tenant.

'Everyone's equal round here,' says the widower and grandfather, sitting on the lawn of the rambling Old Rectory, which he shares with various animals, including a 23-year- old goose called Lunch.

He bursts out laughing when I ask him if he has ever tugged a forelock. 'Look, I live in this big old house and Susan, who owns the village, lives in a cottage. It's a funny old place.'

'This is a brilliant community,' says another tenant, Netta Wase. 'I don't know what we'd do without Susan and her family.'

Back at the Castleman Hotel - formerly the estate's dower house - business is brisk. The place is managed by Teddy Bourke (Patrick's and Susan's younger brother) and the chef is his wife, Barbara.

The Castlesman family owned Chettle in 1903, when the staff were pictured outside the Lodge

Her cooking pulls in a full house from miles around. It's a charming old place with smart new rooms and a library decorated with family crests and a pirate flag captured by a swashbuckling Bourke ancestor.

A lawyer by training, Teddy is working as the barman tonight, but he knows many of the guests like old friends. He tells them to pour their own drinks, while he talks me through the story of Chettle and the women who have kept it going.

The village and the estate have hardly changed in size since the Domesday Book. In 1847, Chettle was bought by the Castlemans - a Dorset family on the up. By the Edwardian era, it had passed down to Edward Castleman.

He preferred hunting to managing his estate, and Chettle's fortunes were saved only by his marriage to the wealthy Jessie Morris.

When she died in 1937, he was left childless, elderly and alone. At the outbreak of war, his niece Esther Bourke and her young children came down to spend a few days with Uncle Edward.

'She came for the weekend. And she never left,' explains Teddy. While her husband, Leslie, went off to fight in the Far East and Uncle Edward grew frail, Esther ended up running the Chettle estate through the war.

'She was a strong woman. She wasn't born to the manor and I think that's what made her work all the harder,' says Teddy.

Leslie Bourke returned from the war seeking a divorce, while Edward Castleman died in 1946. Faced with hefty death duties, the obvious solution was to sell up. But Esther could not bear breaking up an estate she had come to love.

She auctioned off anything portable, from livestock to timber to works of art. It was just enough to keep the estate and the village intact.

'Everyone was telling her she was mad,' says Teddy. 'But that just made my mother more determined. The house was virtually empty, except for the 32 buckets we put under the roof whenever it rained.'

In time, Esther pulled Chettle back from the brink and, when she died in 1967, she left the big house to Patrick and the estate to Susan. In due course, it will be down to Peter and Fiona and their sons to steer it into the future.

It will be a substantial challenge to keep Chettle in one piece without selling parts of the village or raising the rents to commercial rates.

And yet, Peter is determined to keep it as it is. I point out that an estate like this, with all these houses and fertile acres, is worth at least £30 million. Why go through the stress of maintaining a Victorian idyll? Why not play the market or just sell?

Peter recoils, blinking in disbelief at the very thought. 'I can't imagine this place any other way,' he says firmly. 'Everyone likes it the way it is.'

Much as it will dismay the social engineers of the modern metropolitan elite, I cannot find a single villager who disagrees.

• The Enduring Village by Joyce Prince (Prince Publishing, £20).