Again, and again, in the mid-1980s, I would drive the short distance from Charlottetown east to Marshfield, along the Saint Peter’s Road, and park on a layby and look at this house, now long demolished, sitting in its extensive farmland. Empty, a bit shabby, no longer the centre of an energetic farm family life, it nonetheless mesmerised me by its occult symmetry, its bold frontispiece with a recessed door and protruding three-part window in the upstairs hall. It had a story to tell, an English one, that first manifested itself in the Eighteenth Century. The fascination was not only with the house and its style, but also its place at…