Field Book of Country Houses and Their Owners: Family Seats of the British Isles By Hugh Montgomery

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A hundred years ago there were some 10,000 family seats in the British Isles - that is to say, country houses, from castles to major houses, in traditional private occupation and supported by agricultural estates, great and small. Today, after a series of acute agricultural depressions, a couple of world wars and a relentless onslaught of confiscatory taxation, there are barely 2000. Despite the booming heritage industry and the recent growth of the cult of the country house, the majority of these surviving seats are almost completely unknown. While the over-exposed statelies are revisited over and over again, their poor relations, the hidden halls and minor manor houses, too often remain unrecorded - though they are every bit as important to the fabric of the countryside as their grander neighbours.