This week, to close out a summer spent primarily at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are doing something unusual. Instead of returning to Buckingham Palace for the fall season as usual, the queen and her husband of more than 70 years are going to spend two weeks in relative seclusion at Wood Farm, a five-bedroom cottage on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. It’s the house where Philip had been living full-time for nearly three years, until the pandemic prompted courtiers to whisk him to Windsor Castle in March.
It’s not entirely clear why the pair is planning to spend two weeks at the house she usually visits briefly. Some reports speculate that the couple wanted to spend some time almost entirely alone, after the pandemic has brought them six months of nightly dinners and an unusual amount of togetherness. But while the queen is confirmed to be returning to Windsor, Philip’s plans are unclear, and the palace has not confirmed whether the two will continue to quarantine together. Over the weekend, the Sun reported that the trip was actually a compromise, giving Philip an opportunity to spend some time at his favorite place before they both move back to Windsor Castle to preserve staff resources and maintain the “HMS Bubble.”
Wood Farm, located on a secluded part of Sandringham that looks out over the sea, is where the queen, Philip, and their children have gone to relax for more than 50 years. When the family is there, servants don’t wear the usual royal uniforms and Philip does not stand on ceremony. It’s also where the queen is known to cook and even do dishes, according to the Telegraph. So while it’s now where Philip and the queen are choosing to go for a bit of privacy, for more than a century it was also the place the royal family went to hide many things—from illnesses to ex-wives—that they wanted out of public eye.
The Sandringham estate is sometimes described as the place where the Windsors feel most at home, partially because it doesn’t have as much historical importance as some of their other properties. In 1862, Queen Victoria purchased the plot of land in a rural part of Norfolk as a homestead for her oldest son, who would become King Edward VII in 1901. For £220,000 (or about £27 million in today’s value), the family bought about 7,000 acres and five farms, which all had live-in tenants.
The previous owner was an absentee landlord, so the main house and many of the farms were in need of major repairs when Edward and his wife, Alexandra of Denmark, began to make the estate their home. Over the course of a decade, the couple built 26 cottages for laborers and nearby townspeople. When King George V and Queen Mary were married and became the Duke and Duchess of York in 1893, they took over a cottage and continued to build on it as their family expanded.
When the royal family first bought the Sandringham estate, Wood Farm was just one of a number of cottages already on the grounds. When the writer William Dutt wrote about the area in 1904, he mentioned a farmhouse down the road from the royal train station and said that the locals called the area “Marsh Farm,” and an area directory from 1883 shows it being occupied by a farmer. The first indication that it would be important to the history of the royal family came in 1910, when George became king, and he and Mary decided to send their youngest son, Prince John, to live there with a nurse. A year before, John had begun to suffer epileptic seizures, and Mary’s biographers agree that the move was intended to keep him out of the public eye. One of those biographers, Anne Edwards, wrote that it was “hard to assess” Mary’s feelings about the situation because she rarely wrote about John in her letters.
Though John lived a happy life at Wood Farm, with his own garden to tend and a flock of chickens, he was disconnected from most of his family. In a letter to a mistress, his older brother Edward VIII (who would go on to abdicate the throne and become the Duke of Windsor) wrote that the family would only visit him once or twice a year, but his grandmother Alexandra was a frequent visitor. John died on January 18, 1919, after fighting stopped in World War I but before peace treaties were signed, and was buried at the church on Sandringham’s grounds. In the New York Times, an obituary said he died at Sandringham and added that “he was the favorite brother of Princess Mary, who loved to romp with him.”
It’s not clear why the family chose to install Prince John in that cottage over any of the other ones available, but there are a few clues available, including the nearby fir and pine trees that seem to have given the house its new name. The house is isolated, with a view of the sea to the west, but it’s also only two miles from the train station where the royals would arrive at the estate, and conveniently located near pheasant-shooting grounds. Not unsurprisingly, these are the qualities that Philip reportedly admired about Wood Farm when he decided it might be good to renovate.
After Prince John died, the royals rented out the house, much like they do with the rest of the properties on the Sandringham estate. There’s some evidence that it was already inhabited by the end of 1919, but eventually, it became the home of James Ansell, the royal family’s physician. Ansell became close to the royals, tending to the queen when she had measles in 1949 and even examining her father after he died at Sandringham in 1952. But by the mid-1960s, he was ready to retire from his role and move out of the house.
By then Philip was a member of the family, and had already taken an enthusiastic interest in running Sandringham House and the farmland that surrounded it. After noticing how expensive it was to open the big house for a short weekend trip, he decided to find a cottage that the family or their guests could stay in without a huge staff, settling on the Ansell house because it was secluded yet still close to the stables. The family began using the house in 1967, and according to columnist Basil Boothroyd, Philip decorated the walls with his own art. Prince Charles began hosting shooting parties there while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. One of Charles’s biographers noted that while Philip designed the bedrooms, Charles was busy planning music to play in each room. He continued to use Wood Farm as a country retreat into his adulthood.
Before Philip retired and moved to the estate full-time, it was mainly a guest house for visitors who wanted to have complete privacy. Though Princess Diana was raised at Sandringham, the Spencers being among the royal family’s renters, one of her first visits to the estate before Charles proposed was for a shooting party in 1980; she stayed at Wood Farm with the queen. After her separation from Prince Andrew in the 1990s, Sarah Ferguson was not invited to royal Christmas celebrations, but she was allowed to stay at the cottage with Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, who would then join the rest of the royals at the main house without her. When Kate Middleton traveled to Sandringham for one of her first royal country weekends in the early 2000s, Prince William also put her up at Wood Farm.
When Philip retired in 2017, he settled into a private and solitary way of life, though royal historian Hugo Vickers said that the queen would take the train to visit him frequently before the pandemic started. The queen is due back to Windsor Castle at the beginning of October, so she only has a few weeks to take on what is essentially the royal’s version of glamping. Because the marshes give them privacy, it’s the place where the royals can live as close to normal as possible—even if their normal is a little different from everyone else’s.
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