AFTER being in the same family for three generations, one of east Kent’s most discreet small estates comes onto the market. visits a house where time hasn’t stood still, but has run at a stately, unrushed pace.

Heronden is a small world of mellow brick held in the arms of a shallow valley and encircled by great beech trees. Most of these old manor houses have long been bought up, tarted up, and their souls discarded in the skip along with the old kitchen and bathroom.

Heronden, however, has been in the same family for three generations, and, while suitably contemporary in all essential mod cons, still preserves great dollops from a past when horsepower came on four feet, not four wheels.

It is a Georgian house, of apparently modest proportions, set in a quadrangle formed by the house, stunning tithe barn, old stabling and a Dutch gabled lodge house. There are also two three-bedroom houses on the estate.

In summer, it grows great shaggy eyebrows of wisteria, shading the impressively large sash windows that lighten the rooms.

While there are early 20th century additions, the main house is immediately welcoming because of the very human, intimate size of the rooms. The proportions are elegant, but, even more importantly, a couple sitting in one of these rooms would always be in contact with each other: they are lovingingly sized, not cold, large and distant.

It has history: it was owned by one of Horatio Nelson’s captains, John Harvey, who died after the battle of the Glorious June 1, which saw Napoleon’s fleet effectively stopped as a maritime force.

Nelson is believed to have stayed here - he came often to Deal, and the owner says his grandmother would always point out the room in which he and Emma Hamilton stayed. As it is on the second floor, where the servants would have lived, he reckons there may be a touch of fiction involved, but then why let facts destroy a good story?

The wood-panelled library is warm, well-lit, and obviously much used, fresh woodsmoke mixing with the faint residue of wood polish. Beyond it is one of his grandmother’s additions, a drawing room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling looking out over a sunken brick courtyard where an old fountain plays.

The kitchen has a sensible size preparation room, and next to it a bootroom, for the shedding or donning of outdoors gear, full of old jackets, and heavy shoes .

This is still a house that belongs in a truly rural time. In the outbuildings the wood is carefuly stacked in criss-cross fashion to allow the air to circulate.

The stables still sport their old, worn wooden divisions. On one some artist of the British primitive school has painted the silhouette of a line of horses. Underneath is a child’s attempts to copy them.

These outbuildings are dry and well roofed, but have not been glammed up. They are for the most part working sheds, with the exception of a couple that have become pool room and lounge for the children and their friends, all rough whitewashed brick and a just a slight feeling of a college frat house from 50 years back.

The gardens, in all their forms, cover some 14 acres.

"There is always a corner you can find that needs attacking," says the owner. "On the other hand, if you don’t attack it, you don’t have to look at them all the time, so it doesn’t really matter."

The truth is that over three generations the family have created all sorts of delights. The only chemicals these gardens have seen are when the slugs descend on the hostas, and when moss invades the brick and stone paths.

The owner’s grandfather worked for Shell in China, where he was introduced by a Scotsman to the game of golf. If he ever had the misfortune of landing up in England rather than Scotland, he was advised, try the Royal St George’s Club at Sandwich for a proper links course.

Decades later, having moved to the States and wanting a place in England for his family, he did, and came across Heronden.

Even today, walking down the narrow lane that leads from a hardly-used backroad, down the dip filled with beech trees, and turning into the courtyard, is to feel the outside world gently and respectfully recede.

Push open the wooden doors of the tithe barn, look at the huge beams that form its frame, and the arrowslit openings through which the breeze would dry the grain, and sniff centuries of solid rural routine.

The Georgians achieved a balance between elegance and an understanding of the countryside in which they lived and worked.

In Heronden it is still there.