AN Englishman's home is his castle, so the saying goes, even more so if it has central heating, double glazing and a neat front lawn.

Recently, I found myself passing through one of those small, mock-olde worlde estates of brand-new homes that look like a mish-mash of cottages, houses and manor homes from the last five centuries.

This weird mock-Tudor GeorgianVictorianEdwardian architectural cacophony echoes a past that never existed as well-insulated, beautifully-appointed modern homes ape 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century dwellings in a twisted pseudo-village setting that's as lifeless as a ghost town.

There, surrounded by a clearly turfed lawn, was something called Forester's Cottage.

A look at the surrounding landscape was enough to reveal it's built on ancient heathland that hasn't felt the growth of a tree root in tens of thousands of years. Perhaps appropriately in a place where nothing is as it seems, on closer inspection it turns out that Forester's Cottage is actually a mini-terrace of three smaller homes.

Nearby is another cabal called The Old Schoolhouse - it's built on land that wasn't even inhabited until the mid-1990s. Not very old at all then. There's even The Old Bakery that, you guessed it, never knew a time before bread was sold by the gram.

Might as well have been called The Old Cobbler's!

Look up and you'll see a frankly bizarre home dominating the land in front of it.

It's big and built in a mind-bending mix of Tudor and Colonial styles, surrounded by a black-painted wrought iron fence - presumably to allow its owners to feel they are keeping out the local serfs.

(Serfs, that is, who will have paid anywhere between £300,000 and the thick end of £1 million to live in this peculiar wipe-clean world of implied fiefdom.) Ask a few questions and you find a world governed by petty-minded idiosyncrasy.

Residents are not allowed to hang their washing on an outside line (very eco-friendly!), change the colour of their front door without consultation, park their work vehicles on the road or watch television after 11pm. (Only one of those regulations is made up, but you don't have to search too far to find similar regulations apply on certain developments up and down the land.) No children play here - not even in the woodchipped safe-play zone - there's no noise, no litter and the wheelie bins are hidden from view. Cut down a tree and you'll be hard-pushed to count more than ten rings.

And yet work does go on here. Between the end of breakfast and the start of coffee time, a few souls arrive carrying rubber gloves and dusters. They are the cash-in-hand cleaners most likely paid below minimum wage to keep these grotesque time capsules spick and span like some creepy, colourless version of Stepford.

Truly scary. With Hallowe'en upon us, give me a haunted house any day.