Lords and ladies for a day

It had been a long day. My 71-year-old mother had flown overnight from the US to visit her expatriate daughter and her three grandchildren, arriving as the sun was beginning to come up in London. But instead of letting her take a nap, or even grab a cup of coffee, we had stuffed her into the back of a minivan for a 40-minute journey to the cottage I had rented for a week in the English countryside.

Soon after we arrived -- as I struggled in vain to unlock the old Dutch door of the Garden Cottage on the Polesden Lacey estate in Surrey, about 32km from central London -- I began to wonder if we had made a grave mistake. I had rented a country house from the National Trust, England's century-old charitable foundation responsible for protecting and maintaining some of the nation's most precious stately homes, castles and gardens for the visiting public. But from the rear entrance, it did not appear to have "privileged views" onto a formal garden, as described on the National Trust Cottages Web site, where I had spent the better part of a day browsing through the photographs and descriptions of at least 50 of the trust's 323 rental properties around Britain. Rather, the former gardener's cottage seemed to be surrounded by nothing more than a field of dying daffodils and some abandoned farming equipment.

But after my 13-year-old had taken the keys and opened the back door as if she'd lived in this house all her life, it was clear I had made the right choice. At a little past 6pm, with the gates to the main estate locked up for the night, and all the visitors gone for the day, the place was ours.

As the current tenants of the Garden Cottage, which in the mid-1900s housed the head gardener responsible, along with 15 others, for pruning and trimming the acres of formal gardens and lawns now so artfully laid out before us, we were, literally, the lords, or rather ladies, of the manor. Until the house reopened at 11am, we had the gardens to ourselves.

With the sun starting to set over the deep vale in the distance, we strolled into the walled rose garden, where our brochure informed us the Duke and Duchess of York (later George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother) took walks during their honeymoon in April 1923. They were visiting Polesden because it was the home of their close friend Ronald Greville, a legendary Edwardian hostess who with her husband bought the 19th-century Regency manor house in 1906. She bequeathed it to the National Trust in 1942. Walking under the rose pergola toward the ornate center fountain, sipping glasses of champagne, we could hear the children giggling as they rolled down the hill to the croquet lawn just below.

"Don't you just feel like Elizabeth Bennet at Netherfield," my mother, a Jane Austen fanatic, whispered. "However did you happen to find such a place for let?"

"Wow," I thought. My Michigan mother was suddenly speaking like someone from 19th-century England. "The Internet," I answered, hoping to bring her back to the future.

In fact, I had had no idea what was in store for us when I'd perused the Holiday Cottages Web site two months earlier -- a slide show of former servants' quarters, mills, lighthouses, stables and carriage houses all over England, Wales and Northern Ireland -- after being told by a British friend about the possibility of renting one of these properties for a vacation.