One of the legacies of the great landed estates in England is the large number of distinctive estate cottages which are scattered throughout the countryside. These are, of course, more in evidence in some counties than others, particularly in those where a considerable proportion of land was owned by the elite. Estate cottages survive in some numbers from the eighteenth century, but the greatest number was built in the nineteenth. Research on estate buildings has tended to highlight the model village, built largely during the first half of the nineteenth century and created for aesthetic reasons. A well-known example is Somerleyton in Suffolk, designed in the 1840s for the then owner of Somerleyton Hall. Here, the cottages, built in a variety of styles – some with mock timber-framing, others with thatched roofs – surround the village green. Ilam in Staffordshire is another example, where cottages which were designed by G.G. Scott in 1854 display a range of styles and materials, many alien to the local area. A third example is Edensor on the Duke of Devonshire's Derbyshire estate, where the stone buildings exhibit distinctive Italianate features. The list could be extended, but these examples were clearly designed to impress, to provide aesthetic pleasure for the owners and, in the case of Ilam, to create a picturesque image of idyllic contentment among the labouring population as much as to provide good, spacious, sanitary accommodation for employees. In each of these examples, the cottages are generally of individual design and thus expensive to build.