Country Life
WORTHLESS ACRES.
Some precise figures, on a subject to which I have often referred, have just been given Me ; and they may serve as comment on a remarkable letter recently written to the Times by Lord Lothian. A Miclland estate, exactly sixty-five miles north of London, was recently assessed for death duties. The land is just under 2,000 acres in extent and contains six good farmhouses with outbuildings and a villageful of cottages as well as outlying cottages. It was valued for death duties at the price of £5 an acre, all the houses included. The assessment was vigorously fought by the representatives of the owner on the grounds, first, that it would be impossible to sell the land at that price, and second, that the property was losing a good many hundred pounds a year. The estate was a liability, not an asset. Much of the grass on the farms is excellent. I have seen splendid crops of beans, wheat and clover ; and one of the farmhouses is a solid and lovely sixteenth-century building of dark-red brick with such added attractions as deep ingle-nooks. A house agent would revel in the opportunity for describing the place and its attractions. It is in the centre of one of the best hunting districts in England ; and if keepers were any longer kept would maintain a fine head of game—of partridges in the open, and of pheasants in a spacious and lovely wood and many spinneys. Never- theless and notwithstanding, the present value is quite certainly less than £5 an acre, land and houses and woods and foxes included. There must be something radically wrong with our civilization that this land and these houses should be as near as may be worthless when people are paying £500 for a houseless acre by some unlovely suburb.
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