WHO wants to live in a countryside home that adorns Jersey’s £5 note?
The National Trust for Jersey is currently seeking a tenant for Le Rât Cottage, on Mont L’Evesque in St Lawrence, arguably one of the Island’s most beautiful old granite properties.
The cottage, which has its own vegetable patch in the garden, is believed to have been built in the 16th or very early 17the century, and, according to the Jersey history website Jerripedia, the earliest known owner was Jean Gibault in 1606.
The cottage has featured on the Jersey £5 note since the current banknotes were introduced in 2010.
Rather reassuringly, its name does not refer to rodents, but rather to rates, with L’Office du Jèrriais tracing the name back to ‘some sort of financial arrangement connected historically with the property’.
The house was the first to be bought by the National Trust for Jersey in 1937 and cost £200 at the time. The organisation now rents it out to generate funds. According to the trust, at one point it was used as a pigsty.
Estate agents Livingroom are advertising the house for £2,750 per month.
‘Partial gardening services’ are included in the rent, and in true countryside cottage fashion the house has an Aga cooker.
The estate agents describe the house as ‘a beautiful granite property situated in a quiet lane in the sought-after parish of St Lawrence that is sympathetically refurbished throughout, yet still retaining many original features. Le Rât is extremely charming and boasts an abundance of character’.
