Lacey Green

Lacey Green is home to one of the county’s preserved windmills, this one a Smock Mill, in which only the cap carrying the sails rotates to meet the wind. As a result, the body of the mill where the machinery is housed can be bigger, heavier and stronger. Built in the mid 1600s, and moved from Chesham to this site in 1821, it is the oldest Smock Mill in England.

It was at Lacey Green that the young poet Rupert Brooke used to spend his weekends in the company of friends at a local pub. The son of a master at Rugby School, and a student at Cambridge University, Brooke began writing poetry as a boy and travelled widely in the years leading up to the First World War. Early on in the war his poetry showed a boyish patriotism, but his later works were full of bitter disillusion. He died in 1915 while on his way to the attempted landings at the Dardanelles in Turkey.

Close to the village is Speen Farm and the Home of Rest for Horses, whose most famous patient was Sefton, the cavalry horse injured in the Hyde Park bomb blast of the early 1980s. A society was founded in 1886 as a retreat and rescue for working horses from the streets of London. It moved here in 1971 and each year some 200 horses, ponies and donkeys pass through, some to rest, others, like Sefton, to retire.