Le Verger

Nobody knows exactly how old the house is. The main house probably began in the 14th century as a private chapel for the de Créquy family: a de Créquy crest was found inscribed on the wall of the first-floor bedroom.

Later, monks stayed there on wood-cutting trips to the forest at Hesdin. When the church next door was built in the 16th century, the house became its presbytery. Some time in the 19th century it became a farm, with a stable block and hay lofts.

By the time Peter and Moira came to it, nobody had lived there for about ten years.

Peter and Moira bought the house in 2001 and set about bringing it back.

They kept what the farm had left behind and found new uses for it. The 19th-century stables became the covered terrace: the beams and roof stayed, and the walls were taken away. The rest of the stable block became a huge farmhouse kitchen, with a garden room opening onto the terrace. The hay lofts in the west wing became attic bedrooms with skylights.

In the main house, the gothic arched window was rebuilt with stained glass. The walls, more than a metre thick in places, kept the rooms cool in summer and warm in winter, and the sitting room was built around a big open fire. At the top of the house the attic became the main bedroom, six metres by seven, with timber beams, skylights and a rolltop bath.

Two wings were added to the main building, making a courtyard with the covered terrace along one side.

Verger is French for orchard.

When it was finished, the house slept fourteen in double and twin rooms, with futons and spare beds tucked away for bigger parties. The kitchen had a range cooker, two dishwashers, plates and glasses for thirty, and a long farmhouse table that guests remembered more than anything else. The sitting room had three big sofas, shelves of books and the fire.

Outside there was an acre of garden next to the church, private behind a laurel hedge. There was a copse where hammocks hung between the trees, a field for games and picnics, a kitchen garden of fruit, vegetables and herbs, and a trellised patio by the shed, which held eight bicycles. There was a ping-pong table, two sets of boules and two barbecues.

Guests noticed the small things: deer crossing the field, flycatchers nesting under the eaves of the terrace roof, the delphiniums flattened by a summer thunderstorm. In winter it often snowed, there were hills nearby for sledging, and steaks were cooked on the open fire. In spring the woods around Hesdin filled with wood anemones and bluebells.

From around 2003 until the house was sold in 2025, Le Verger was a house for groups. Families came for Christmas and New Year, three generations at a time. There were reunions with relatives over from Australia and New Zealand, a seventieth birthday, a Thanksgiving dinner, a book club, golfers who came back for more, and cyclists who stayed three times.

Peter and Moira often cooked. They ran catered golf weekends, and for special occasions they would cook a full dinner and stay to serve it. One guest wrote of a party weekend in the snow: “They were there from 6 until gone midnight having cooked and waited and washed-up.”

There were at least three weddings, with a marquee in the courtyard joined to the covered terrace, services in the local churches, and a horse and carriage through the village. Le Verger was featured in You and Your Wedding magazine.

They kept finding new reasons to fill the house, and invitations survive for some of the occasions they planned.

Wambercourt is a small village, safe and friendly, and good for children. One family wrote that their children’s highlight was being able to walk to the post box “all by themselves!”

The house stands beside the village church. In the churchyard are three graves of an RAF crew whose plane came down nearby, and they were always well tended. Guests found them too. One family’s children watered the plants there every day of their stay. Another group, finding they were in Wambercourt on the anniversary of the airmen’s deaths, bought flowers and laid them on the graves.

Wambercourt sits in the Pays des Sept Vallées, the seven river valleys between the Course and the Authie, with the Planquette running through the village. The Sunday Times once called it “Northern France’s best-kept-secret terrain”.

The battlefield of Agincourt is six kilometres away. In Fressin, the next village, are the ruins of a 15th-century château. Montreuil, the walled town that inspired part of Les Misérables, is 25 minutes away, and Hesdin, with its old square and market, ten minutes. Beyond them are the long beach at Le Touquet and the fishing port at Étaples.