The house may be a bargain — but how about the Chippendale to go with it?

Spring sunshine encourages us all to browse estate agents’ windows. This week’s featured property, Dumfries House, looks at first glance like a rare example of value for money in an overheated market. This exquisite mid-18th-century mansion designed by Robert and John Adam comes with 1,940 acres — yet for the same price, £6.75 million, from the same agent, Savills, you could buy nothing more than a five-bedroomed townhouse with a 30ft garden in Pelham Crescent, South Kensington.

There are, however, some drawbacks to Dumfries House, leaving aside the obvious one that it’s nowhere near Dumfries, so your removal van may never find it. The estate is in fact in east Ayrshire, near Cumnock, a bleak former mining community which claims the Labour party pioneer Keir Hardie and the football manager Bill Shankly as its most distinguished sons — so it doesn’t come with quite the same social cachet as Pelham Crescent.