Andrew is stepping down the property ladder – what to know about Marsh Farm ...Middle East

After years of quiet decrepitude, Marsh Farm was this week alive with the sound of workmen’s drills and radios playing country music as it was being prepared for the arrival of its latest resident – Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

The handsome, if somewhat neglected, brick and sandstone farmhouse on the edge of the Norfolk village of Wolferton stands just two miles from Sandringham House – the King’s £60m private residence and surrounding 20,000-acre estate used as a retreat by generations of the Windsor clan after it was bought by Queen Victoria.

Quite how many invitations Mountbatten-Windsor will be receiving to attend the main house is unclear after he was stripped of his remaining royal titles last October in the wake of the enduring Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

As part of the same process he was required to relinquish Royal Lodge, the sprawling 30-room mansion in Windsor Great Park for which he had paid a peppercorn rent since 2004 in return for financing £8m of renovations.

Instead, the ex-duke, who has always denied wrongdoing over his links to the paedophile financier and strongly rejected accusations of sexual assault by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, has reportedly been offered Marsh Farm.

Marsh Farm is empty and unfurnished

The mossy-roofed rural domain is owned by the King via the Sandringham Estate and sits off a lightly pot-holed track amid a thicket of outbuildings whose tenants include a maker of upmarket wrought-iron bedsteads and a supplier of off-road farm runabouts. Wolferton, where most properties are owned by the royal estate, lacks a village shop or pub, but it does have a social club.

As removal vans were this week spotted coming and going from Royal Lodge, it is increasingly expected that Andrew will start his East Anglian exile within weeks, moving into temporary digs on the Sandringham Estate ahead of his 66th birthday next month while Marsh Farm undergoes an urgent programme of works.

It is not expected that Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, who had made much of the fact that the couple’s divorce was so amicable that they both continued to live at Royal Lodge, will be joining him in Norfolk.

While Marsh Farm is not quite the “shoebox-sized” residence which royal aides had previously briefed was awaiting the King’s brother, the currently empty and reportedly unfurnished house represents a considerable step down the property ladder for a one-time prince accustomed to a certain square footage. His first marital home, Sunninghill Park, boasted 12 bedrooms.

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By contrast, Marsh Farm is understood to have just five bedrooms, alongside two reception rooms and a kitchen so outmoded that it is having to be replaced as part of renovations thought to be funded by the monarch. The house has remained empty for a number of years, following the death of its last resident, a tenant farmer who oversaw the adjacent fields.

Indeed, for Andrew, who remains eighth-in-line to the throne, it seemed this week that a slow, if inexorable, slide from the ranks of high society and influence to an enforced anonymity was entering its final stages.

One Wolferton resident told The i Paper: “I don’t expect we’ll be seeing much of him but the social club has a monthly bingo night. I’m sure they’d be happy to welcome him if he was at a loose end.”

Village life for former prince

But while the Wolferton Social Club does offer a comforting array of pastimes – including a cribbage circle, bowls, darts and dominoes sessions – the clanking of diggers and buzz of power tools emanating from Marsh Farm suggested that embracing village life may not be at the top of Mountbatten-Windsor’s to-do list.

In recent days a stout 6ft-high wooden fence has been erected around the house to keep out prying eyes while also beefing up security for the Sovereign’s brother. To that end, among the contractors arriving at the house has been a specialist CCTV camera supplier.

According to reports, other visitors have included internet and television wiring installers, wearing hats emblazoned with the words “Sky VIP Team”, called in to provide Andrew with a link to the online world.

The former Royal Navy helicopter pilot is reputed to be a huge fan of flight-tracker websites, beaming live maps of aircraft departing nearby Heathrow Airport onto a wall at Royal Lodge. It is unclear whether the roster of departures and arrivals at Norwich Airport will provide a similar level of entertainment.

The aim, it has been reported, is to have the work at Marsh Farm completed by April, allowing Mountbatten-Windsor to comfortably meet his deadline of having left Royal Lodge by this October.

Distance between Andrew and other royals ‘for indefinite period’

Details of how Andrew intends to spend his time in Norfolk are scant, though observers point out that Sandringham’s status as home to the Royal Stud would give him free rein to indulge his love of horse-riding.

Quite how much socialising he will be doing with senior frontline royals, including the King and Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales, who remain frequent visitors to the estate, remains unclear.

Royal sources have suggested that a request from Andrew to move to Wood Farm, another Sandringham residence which was used by the late Prince Philip during his retirement from royal duties, was rejected because it would have placed Mountbatten-Windsor in too close proximity to other royals.

For its part, Buckingham Palace has said it will not be confirming any details –including any rent to be paid on Marsh Farm – about Mountbatten-Windsor’s living arrangements, with aides pointing out that he is now a “private citizen” and Sandringham is a “private estate”.

A former senior royal aide said: “The Palace has deployed a successful strategy of saying as little as possible about the former duke. It is difficult to see why they would now change that. I think you can expect a distance to be kept for an indefinite period.”

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In the meantime, work was continuing unabated at Marsh Farm with lights on in upstairs rooms and tradesmen in the grounds.

It was perhaps unlikely that the house’s new resident would have enjoyed one of the country music tunes being played by contractors installing the fencing. The song, Alan Jackson’s Summertime Blues, includes the refrain: “Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do/Cos there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”

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