The House of Whispers by William le Queux

Midway between historic Fotheringhay and ancient Apethorpe, the ancestral seat of the Earls of Westmorland, lay the long, straggling, and rather poverty-stricken village of Woodnewton. Like many other Northamptonshire villages, it consisted of one long street of cottages, many of them with dormer windows peeping from beneath the brown thatch, the better houses of stone, with old mullioned windows, but all of them more or less in stages of decay. With the depreciation in agriculture, Woodnewton, once quite a prosperous little place, was now terribly shabby and depressing.

As he entered the village, the first object that met the eye of the stranger was a barn with the roof half fallen away, and next it a ruined house with its moss-grown thatch full of holes. The paving was ill-kept, and even the several inns bore an appearance of struggles with poverty.