Country House Rescue · S1 E3
Chesters
Ancrum, Scottish Borders
This one survived. It remains in business.
The short answer
Remains the private family home of the Hendersons (Ogilvie-descended); Scottish Borders Brewery Limited (beer manufacturing) is an ACTIVE company registered at this address, indicating ongoing commercial estate activity, though the house itself is not a public visitor attraction.
What happened on the show
John and Ellie Henderson had a clear dream and no way to pay for it: to give up their London jobs and settle permanently at Chesters, the Henderson ancestral home on the banks of the River Teviot near Ancrum in the Scottish Borders. The seventeenth-century, Grade I listed house came with fourteen estate cottages and a mile of river frontage, assets on paper that were not translating into the income the couple needed to make the move. Ruth Watson's task was to find the profit hiding in the estate, to turn a beautiful but costly property into something that could actually support a family living there full time. When she returned for the Revisited follow-up, the state she had first found the house in was still fresh in her mind: it had been in a parlous condition, needing large sums spent to secure its future. The two things she came back to check were whether the Hendersons had taken her commercial advice, and whether they had finally managed the permanent move north from London.
After the cameras left
Chesters remains a private family home rather than a public visitor attraction, still held by the Hendersons. The clearest live commercial signal we could confirm is Scottish Borders Brewery, an active beer-manufacturing company registered at the estate address, which points to ongoing enterprise on the land even though the house itself is not open to the public. We hold this one at medium confidence: the brewery registration is solid evidence of commercial activity at Chesters near Ancrum, but it is not the same as a confirmed weddings or tourism operation, and we found no such visitor business for the house. So the dream of living at the family seat appears to have held, with the estate earning at least partly through the brewery rather than through opening its doors.
Location
Ancrum, Scottish Borders
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Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.