Free Yourself: A character cottage in the country for just over pounds 1: Anne Spackman surveys the highs and lows of dream homes

NEVER MIND pounds 500, let alone pounds 30,000: there is a house that you can buy for less than the price of a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich.

Though it is described as a gingerbread cottage, hidden deep in the ancient Rockingham forest of Northamptonshire, it is no fairy-tale. Deepings Lodge is real and it can be yours for one guinea (pounds 1.05 for post-decimal people.).

This former gamekeeper's lodge is the cheapest and one of the most enchanting houses on the market - a rare opportunity for someone with very little money but lots of imagination and practical skill to create a secret hideaway.

The Lodge sits between Stamford and Kettering in the Deene Park estate, which has been in the Brudenell family since 1514. The present owner, Edmund Crispin Stephen James George Brudenell is offering a 21-year, full-repairing lease on the cottage. It certainly needs fully repairing.

For a start, the only way to reach the lodge is on foot or by horseback. There is no road and one would have to be laid across a field. The cottage also has no water, electricity or telephone. Its new owner could do with a mate in the building industry - or an Independent prize.

The cottage is attractive, built of local stone under a slate roof, with good window and chimney details. There are two large rooms downstairs and two small ones - one of which used to be the gamekeeper's larder and measures the size of most people's kitchens. Upstairs there are three rooms, none of them containing a bath or lavatory - another essential piece of building work. There are also several dilapidated outbuildings and kennel runs.

The lease set by the Brudenells is tough. It stipulates that the new owners must, among other things, 'reside at the premises for not less than 200 nights in any period of twelve months'. Deepings Lodge is not to be a weekend cottage.

It is being sold by one of the few agents to appreciate there is a market in inspirational homes. Pavilions of Splendour, based in Maidstone, Kent, currently have on their books a Victorian water tower in Norfolk, an observatory on the Sussex Downs and a Welsh castle with an opera house. Unfortunately, none of them comes within the stipulated pounds 30,000 price bracket.

Another firm which advertises dream houses is In the Sticks, based near Alston in Cumbria. Their bargain basement this month includes Windy Ridge, a wooden beach house on a clifftop at Trimingham in Norfolk for sale at pounds 15,000.

For the same price, you could have the old Co-op at Garrigill near A1ston, a stone building next to the churchyard. Planning permission exists to turn it into a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house with garage, but no doubt something less conventional would do. This is another example of complete renovation required, as this warning implies. 'People enter at their own risk and should take care as many of the floors are unsafe'.

Going upmarket to pounds 28,000, In the Sticks are advertising a white stone house beside the harbour of the fishing port of Helmsdale in Sutherland, Scotland. The house, with two bedrooms and two living rooms has been partially renovated, but requires some more work.

The auction rooms have been the places with the lowest prices in recent years. One man actually paid by credit card for a repossessed flat recently, which cost him pounds 2,000. But the properties which come up at auction as a result of repossession tend to be sad, urban dwellings, which appeal to the determined developer rather than someone looking to change their life.

The cheapest places to find rural retreats are often outside England, in the north of Scotland, the west of Ireland and France. A restored 18th century farmhouse near Cahors is for sale for pounds 25,000 via In the Sticks, leaving you enough money to pay for moving fees and the ferry.

One classic Irish retreat is at Drumkeerin in County Leitrim. For pounds 12,500 you get a three-room cottage with an acre of land, set in hundreds of acres of unspoiled countryside. In Scotland, pounds 8,000 will buy you an unconverted stone bothy in the High1ands or a derelict terrace cottage in Stranraer.

Of course, buying a house is not the only way to move. The owners of Maulds Meaburn in Cumbria were willing to negotiate away part of the pounds 15,000 a year rental for work restoring the Jacobean house or its rococo garden.

Then there is always the option of giving up a roof altogether. The women of Greenham Common probably invented one of the cheapest housing options, the bender, created from pliable, interwoven green shoots covered in plastic. But there was always that problem with the neighbours . . .

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