Country, Mountain, Lake & Desert Retreat

97 records inland: valleys, ridges, lake frontages, high desert and forest. Without a shoreline to argue about, these estates are judged on the two questions this register was built to ask — how much ground, and what is on the other side of the line.

Scale runs wider here than anywhere else in the collection. Finca Cortesin holds 215 hectares in Andalusia and undertakes to leave about 150 of them unbuilt. Amangiri holds six hundred acres of Utah inside a landscape that is otherwise federal and tribal land. Villa d'Este carries some hundred and fifty keys on ten hectares of Renaissance park. All three are country estates and no single adjective covers them.

Inland is also where the borrowed enclosure is most common and least declared. Southern Ocean Lodge is closed on three sides by national park it does not own. Ananda occupies a maharaja's estate that still belongs to the family. Amanbagh irrigates a walled garden against a landscape that would otherwise take it back. In each the seclusion is real and the mechanism is worth naming, because the mechanisms are not the same.

Wrong for travellers who want to swim out of the door, and wrong for anyone who reads distance from a coast as a compromise. It usually is not one: inland is where the largest holdings in this register are.