An country house island escape where 'legend has it that Shakespeare came to stay' while writing The Tempest

The history of a country house is almost always part of its charm — and when that history draws upon the lives of the great, the good and the powerful, the effect is only intensified. And understandably so: the idea of owning a cottage where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stayed, a house where Churchill and Charles de Gaulle talked strategy during the Second World War, or an apartment where Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn held illicit trysts, is a fascinating idea. We may not share the same era as such people, but the idea that we can share the same space is intoxicating.

In the case of Standen House, for sale at £2.3 million just outside Newport on the Isle of Wight, those links to the past reach a height that we don't really recall having seen before: 'Legend has it,' say agents BCM