Gregor Pierrepoint, on the remaining motte of Laxton Castle, took over the estate from his father during the first Covid lockdown - Andrew Crowley

From the ruins of Laxton Castle, 11 miles from Newark, Nottinghamshire, Gregor Pierrepont is pointing towards a wide open range of fields.

“That syke [a strip of common grazing] has probably been a syke since the age of Edgar,” he says. “This is an incredibly ancient landscape – much more ancient than places even like the New Forest. That’s why Laxton is such a special place.”

Laxton is special indeed – it is the last open field farming village in the country. This 1,800-acre estate operates a medieval agricultural system administrated by a court leet – a manorial court with a jury made up of farmers who operate “in common” using a three-year crop rotation.

At Laxton, there’s a certain harmony that comes from operating in this way, “but it’s not some utopian, communist world,” says Pierrepont. “It’s the ancestor of the modern world in every single respect.” Laxton has been his responsibility since 2020 when, shortly after the beginning of the first Covid-19 lockdown, he took over the estate from his father, the Olympic rower Hugh Matheson.

The Pierrepont family – whose name and arms Gregor Pierrepont, né Matheson, assumed in 2018 – came over with William the Conqueror, and have held estates in Nottinghamshire since 1280. “We were a rising gentry family that took advantage of the dissolution of the monasteries and did a lot of land trading,” says Pierrepont. “Between 1540 and 1650, more land came in and out [of the family] than before or since.”

His ancestor Robert Pierrepont, 1st Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull, bought nearby Thoresby Park in 1633 and then Laxton in 1640, where he took over about 60pc of its acreage. The family would eventually become Laxton’s sole proprietors in 1906.

Despite its notability now, and the fact that it featured in the Domesday Book, Laxton was bypassed by history for several hundred years. Being on heavy clay, the farming is difficult, and this disincentivised the family to enclose the land: “it’s not that valuable, was split between multiple owners, and was all a bit like hard work,” says Pierrepont.

Laxton operates an open field system in which individual farmers work strips of unenclosed land - Andrew Crowley

By the turn of the century, Laxton’s status as the last open field village in England had been noticed. Rev Christopher Collinson, vicar of Laxton, described in Country Life in 1906 how at Laxton “one may see what is really a ‘field’, not an enclosure of a few acres, but a great open space of several hundred acres without a tree… a glimpse of old English life”.

Though there were many “inconveniences” that make the open field system a challenge, Collinson added, “for the man who lives among it, but who himself feels not the cumbrousness of it, it is not without its own charm – nay, almost fascination”.

Since Collinson’s time, the estate’s ownership has not been straightforward. In 1940, Gervas Pierrepont, 6th and last Earl Manvers succeeded his invalid cousin Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl Manvers to both the earldom and the Pierrepont estates.

Careful not to dump the enormous tax bills that he had faced upon his own inheritance on his only surviving child Lady Rozelle – since his cousin, who was not of sound mind, had done no forward planning – he quickly began transferring assets in lieu of tax.

In 1952, 1,761 acres and the lordship of the manor at Laxton were sold to the Ministry of Agriculture for £51,500. Later, in 1981, Laxton was transferred to the Crown Estate for £1m, but “they did a terrible job of managing it,” says Pierrepont. Having failed to offload Laxton to the National Trust, the Crown Estate put the estate on the open market in 2018.

Crown Estate sold the estate for just over £7m in 2018 - Andrew Crowley

Two years later, the Thoresby estate, run by Pierrepont’s father Hugh Matheson, bought Laxton for just over £7m.

“We knew going in that the estate was in pretty ropey condition,” says Pierrepont, “and we quickly realised that there was a £5-7m maintenance liability.” Soon after, Pierrepont took over the running of both Laxton and Thoresby. “As the only son it was pretty obvious what I was going to be doing with my life,” he says. Matheson had agreed that he would retire on his 70th birthday, April 16 2020. As it was, he stepped down a fortnight earlier, just as Britain was plunged into lockdown.

Pierrepont has spent much of the past five years doing up the residential properties that have come back to the estate from tenants.

Thanks to years of chronic underinvestment, this has been quite the undertaking: instead of having one big house with a leaking roof and draughty windows, he’s got a whole village of them.

“Generally speaking, when a property that’s been tenanted out for 20 to 30 years comes back, we’d expect to have to spend £40,000 to turn it around,” he says. “We haven’t spent less than £133,000 [on any property], and the average is just short of £200,000. We’ve had four come in and there are 10 left to go.”

Despite the huge amount of money involved, he feels his efforts have been worthwhile to keep Laxton from being broken up and sold off. “The logical thing would have been to persuade three quarters of the farms to give up their tenancies in return for a rent-free house and some cash. You could develop the yards and sell them over the course of 10 to 15 years. Then you’d have 1,800 acres of bare land with one yard, and at £9,500 an acre, that’s just over £17m.

Pierrepoint is spending an average of £200k on renovations for each of the 14 properties in the village - Andrew Crowley

“Having got 15 yards down to one, you’ve got 14 farmhouses and barns left at £600,000 to £700,000 apiece – roughly £9m – plus another half a dozen residential properties at £250,000 each. You’re getting on for the best part of £27m for a £7m purchase. You would have spent £12-13m [doing the work] but you’d have doubled your money. If we hadn’t bought the estate, this is what would have happened, and that would have been an absolute tragedy.”

Beyond Laxton, Pierrepont also runs 10,000-acre Thoresby, which his father inherited from his second cousin Lady Rozelle Raynes in 1975. As well as 4,000 acres of Sherwood Forest, “we’ve got 6,000 acres of high input, high output veg cropping – in terms of calories per acre we’re doing well,” he says.

Just as there’s no big house at Laxton, nor is there at Thoresby either, since Thoresby Hall, rebuilt in 1868 by Anthony Salvin, was damaged by local coal mining and bought by the National Coal Board in 1979. It isn’t missed. “It had been breaking the back of the estate since pretty much the minute it was built,” says Pierrepont.

Still, even after building a warmer, prettier house to replace Salvin’s “monstrosity”, Thoresby was quite the inheritance for the unsuspecting Matheson. “To paraphrase him, sometimes you’ve got a bit of wind behind you and your neighbour doesn’t,” says Pierrepont. “He won a silver medal [in the men’s eight at the 1976 Montreal Olympics] rather than a gold by about half a length. Sometimes the wind blew in his favour, and sometimes it blew against him.”

He’s proud of him, of course. “I think it’s incredibly important if you’re in this sort of position to have a hinterland, and that’s something I don’t really have at the moment,” he says. But it should come in time. “Unless the tax situation drastically changes I will have to fully retire – I won’t be able to stay in the big house until I’m carried out feet first. My father was able to walk away without a shred of regret.

“I think he’d have traded Thoresby for a gold medal,” he laughs.

Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty is published by Hutchinson on 4 September

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