Green Knowe, the house that inspired a children’s classic

The author Lucy M Boston first glimpsed the Norman house known simply as The Manor from a punt on the River Great Ouse in 1915. Its somewhat neglected yet deeply romantic gabled Georgian brick façade quietly captivated her. “It was beautiful and right,” she remembered in her 1973 memoir of the hidden riverside dwelling, encased by elms, beyond whose boundaries she frequently disrobed for wild swims. Little more than two decades later, in 1939, it was hers. 

Built in the early 1100s…