Though only 50 minutes from London, Chalfont St Giles, in Buckinghamshire, is as typical an English village as you can get these days. It has a village green with 16th-century timbered cottages clustering round it. On one side is the village pond and on the other, the old village church. Beyond, stretching on up the hill, are the lovely beech woods for which Buckinghamshire is famous.
On the edge of the village is an old timbered house, built in 1580. It was here, to escape the plague, that John Milton came, in 1665, bringing with him his third wife and 17-year-old Deborah, the youngest of the three daughters he had by his first wife, who died when the children were young. Deborah had the task of reading to her 62year-old father, often in languages she did not understand for, by then, Milton was blind. Unable to climb the ladder to the upstairs bedroom, he adapted the room to the right of the front door as his bedroom-cum-study and it was here, in the pre-dawn stillness - he used to rise at 4 a.m. - that he completed Paradise Lost and composed the whole of Paradise Regained. Even now, sitting in this room, it is still possible to capture the air of 17th-century calm. The sturdy floorboards are 18 inches wide. The inglenook fireplace is big and well-proportioned, the window looking out on to the garden neat and small. It is a room for quiet contemplation.
Displayed in cases around the walls are many of the works, including three first editions, written by the man felt by some to have been England's greatest republican. There is Areopagitica which deals with freedom of speech and censorship, much of it incorporated into the constitution of the US. There is also the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, written while Milton's first wife, Mary Powell, absented herself from the family home for four years. And there is his Observations on the Articles of Peace, which deals with Ireland. This last was written in his capacity as Secretary for the Foreign Tongues to the republican Council of State. Cromwell, believing it was important the Parliamentarian point of view should be promulgated abroad, had appointed Milton to do the job, knowing he was both a Parliamentarian and a Latinist - Latin being the lingua franca of the day.
In the main room - the parlour - with its flagstone floor and huge inglenook fireplace, there is a tall oak and cane chair of Charles II period, bought by the Milton Cottage Trust at a Sotheby's auction and thought to have once belonged to the man himself. In this room also are relics of the Civil War - a soldier's leather water bottle and leather-bound Bible, a shot removed from the church tower. The house itself was owned by George Fleetwood, whose signature is one of those appearing on the death warrant of Charles I.
Out in the cottage garden, one gets an exterior view of the house with its narrow clay bricks, undulating roof and irregular timber supports. Importantly, it is the only extant dwelling the poet lived in - and though in his day the garden may have been home to chickens and pigs, to sit in it now, on a summer's day, is a great joy. Lavender, honeysuckle and sweet pea crowd the flower beds but pride of place is given to a mulberry tree grown from a cutting taken from the black mulberry tree at Christ's - Milton's college at Cambridge.
And what is most intriguing about this house is that, as a listed Grade I building, it has been preserved in its original state so that, were Milton himself to return, he would find it much as he had left it just over 300 years ago.
Chalfont St Giles is north of London, close to the M40. Take a train from Baker Street to Chalfont and Latimer and get a taxi at the station.