Extraordinary garden boasts fairytale towers

At first glance, it's just a bungalow - albeit an unusually pretty one. Enter the garden, though, and you'll find yourself in a fairytale land.

The Beeches, in Weyhill, near Andover in Hampshire, is up for sale with Hamptons for £895,000.

A five-bedroom home with a tiled roof and impressive entrance, it has a drawing room, sitting room, study and a large eat-in kitchen. The master suite has its own dressing room, and there's a family bathroom and extra shower room.

But it's what's outside that's the real attraction of this house.

"In recent years, the rear gardens have been landscaped to reveal the most amazing sunken garden which is of historical and horticultural interest and which has been featured in numerous books and magazines," say Hamptons.

"The only way to appreciate the scale and beauty of the garden is to walk around leisurely."

The extraordinary series of towers and stairways was created by Stanley Norbury, who bought the site and rebuilt the house after the second world war. He started small - a bird bath and a seat - casting cement into moulds.

In the 1960s, he excavated an area to create a swimming pool, but never finished the project - and in 1974 he had a new idea. He lined the sides of the hole with Purbeck stone, and proceeded to fill it with structures cast from cement and carved with fish, birds and animals, ivy garlands and roses.

Norbury made it all up as he went along.

"At no stage, even as each fresh feature appeared, did the outcome result from a preconceived idea," he said.

"The various features, one with another, came into being by the suggestion of what was already complete. They grew from the materials and my inspiration was mainly from Purbeck stone and conifers."

The garden was picked as a finalist in the Daily Mail National Garden Competition in 1995; but Norbury died the following year and the house was sold in 1997.

But it was bought by a local landscape designer in 2010, who set about restoring the garden to its former glory.

"There are walkways from which to enjoy the sculpted gardens below, and stone steps down into this magical world with a variety of places to sit and simply appreciate it," say Hamptons.

"One can only imagine how incredible it would look lit up at night."