I have always loved Oare House just below the Marlborough Downs ever since I visited it as a schoolboy on my bicycle.   The house was built for a wine merchant, Henry Deacon, in 1740.   He took on as an apprentice a poor boy called John Hiller from Ireland who married Deacon’s widow, inherited his house, and left it to his sister’s son, a classic eighteenth-century story.   In the early 1920s it was extended in a playful Georgian style by Clough Williams Ellis for Sir Geoffrey Fry of the chocolate family, who became private secretary to Stanley Baldwin: