In the days known as “yore” it was very simple. If you wanted a posh-ish house in the country — what used to be called a gentleman’s residence — nothing less than a graciously proportioned Georgian pile would do.

Things these days are a little more complicated. Take Richard Caring (the rag-trade billionaire and owner of Annabel’s, George, Le Caprice and the Ivy), whose fortune is estimated by the latest edition of The Sunday Times Rich List at £450m. If you were the richest person in the southwest, well, naturally you would want to live in the grandest house, with an appropriately grand name. Such as a castle, hall, abbey or court. Yet when Caring bought a home on the Devon-Somerset border in 2005, it was not the big house, Pixton Park, a Grade II*-listed Georgian stately home, but rather the more modest stable block.

Admittedly, Caring, who also has a £15m mansion in Hampstead, had no intention of leaving the £1m property as it was. After enlarging it from five to seven bedrooms, he gained permission last year from the local council for a grandiose extension that would include a glass winter garden complete with swimming pool and palms — denounced by one neighbour as “a grandiose Disneyesque whim”. However grandly extended, though, underneath it all it’s still the stable block.

Old prejudices die hard.

If you live in a manor or an old rectory, it is no longer expected that you will be a knight of the shires or a man of the cloth — but even so, a certain dignity will attach to your address, as these were the primary and secondary gentleman’s seats in any English village. Even though a keeper’s cottage may change hands for a million pounds these days, there is no getting away from it: in days of old, it wasn’t the dukes and noblemen who were supping under your roof, but rather the Mellors types. And pigs.

As John Goodall, the architectural editor of Country Life explains: “People place real importance on these names. It’s entirely to do with the perceived importance of the historic integrity of the site. That’s why people keep bits of a 16th-century facade, as you can see at Newstead Abbey, for example. They want people to know their house was once a castle or an abbey.”

In my new book, Shire Hell, set in a fictional Dorset village called Honeyborne, I had great fun deciding where my characters would live. In the crumbling medieval stately home, I put a threadbare aristo and his nubile young second wife. In the Georgian spread complete with helipad, farm shop and orangery, I put a hedge-funder and his Californian chatelaine. My heroine went into shabby Home Farm, the master of foxhounds lived in Lower Foxcombe, the naughty best friend with her own line of hampers who wants to make her own indigenous cheese just had to live in The Dairy, and so on. Every character had their habitation matched to them.

This exercise made me realise what richness and nuance and history lie in our national property bank, and also how much the name of a house matters — not just to its owner, but to its locality. A few years ago, Laura and Peter Carew (an artist and a fund manager, respectively) bought a rambling old place in Somerset on the Barle River called the Tarr Steps Hotel. It was called the Tarr Steps Hotel because — up until when they bought it as a private residence — that was what it was.

“The locals thought we should return it to its original name, which was the Old Rectory,” Laura explains. “We also came under pressure to call it Horlock House, after the vicar, who was called the Reverand Sweetapple Horlock, and whose initials I find everywhere.”

But isn’t it a bit strange living in a house that’s called a hotel? I ask. “Even though there’s still a website and people sweep up the drive a bit, we don’t get as many enquiries as I thought we would,” she says. But we do get lots of letters addressed to the Twelve Steps Hotel — as if we are a rehab centre, which couldn’t be further from reality.”

I myself get terribly cross when visitors to my house on Exmoor refer to it as a cottage. “It’s not a cottage,” I hear myself correcting them. “It’s a farmhouse. And my father’s house is a longhouse.” It is as if by virtue of owning a farmhouse, I can lay claim to some rustic, agricultural heritage, even though I’ve never milked a cow or mended a fence in my life. We like to think that something about the type of dwelling we own rubs off on us, and that people will assume the lofty exteriors of our homes will reflect our own lives in some way.

We are wrong, though, as Alain de Botton writes in The Architecture of Happiness: “Whatever the theoretical affinities between beauty and goodness, it is undeniable that in practice, farmhouses and lodges, mansions and riverside apartments have played host to innumerous tyrants, murderers, sadists and snobs, to characters with a chilling indifference to the disjunctures between the qualities manifested in their surroundings and in their lives.”

Equally, those who hope that buying a large house will bestow on them by magic some commensurately large sort of status may also be disappointed. While it is true that the heir to a large house or a dukedom will never be short of offers (as Plum Sykes acidly noted in a famous article called “The girl who married a house,” about the second marriage of Simon Howard of Castle Howard), the relationship between property and status has changed. Over the past 10 years, the market has been so fluid that the old social order has broken down. Which means there is no assumption that the family who live in the manor house will be the blue-blooded nobs; they are more likely to be oligarchs or bankers or Chinese.

So, basically, it doesn’t matter if you are a rich man in his castle or the poor man in his gatehouse. It’s all about social contacts and networks — just as it is in town. You can’t buy access, even with a spread with 1,000 acres. The truly posh and grand properties — the palaces and houses known by just one word, such as Chatsworth, Belvoir and Althorp — are not for sale at any price. And whatever you buy in the next level down won’t necessarily bring you the forelock-tugging respect you crave, either.

So if you are an agriviste, a new arrival in the county, you could do worse than follow my rules of country living to survive. And if you want to thrive, well, my best advice and final tip for keeping shire hell at bay is to hunt — in which case living in the stables could be a positive advantage.

- Shire Hell by Rachel Johnson is published by Penguin at £6.99. To buy it for £6.64 inc p&p, call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

How to blend in with the locals

1 Never lock your back or front door in the country. Your house must be open at all times in case someone has fallen from their horse during the chase and needs a large drink, which they will expect to be offered before medical assistance or the use of your telephone.

2 Always buy the vegetables at the village shop, even if this means you will exist on a diet of curly carrots and swedes like cannonballs and your children develop rickets. In fact, you must claim to buy everything at the village shop, including all Christmas presents, even if the choice is restricted to a box of fudge with the picture of the Cobb at Lyme Regis on it and something called Local Honey. Never admit that, in reality, like everyone else, you use the shop only for papers, milk, and emergency whisky, bread and loo paper.

3 You must drink at the village pub and buy the barman a drink even if the pub changes hands every five minutes and serves horrible, pretentious food at London prices, and even if the barman has never acknowledged your existence and looks like (and probably is) a serial killer and/or sheep-shagger.

4 Don’t venture out unless accompanied by a dog or astride a horse. You will be taken for a poacher or, worse, a rambler, and probably shot, and your body will be hung from a gibbet as a warning to others.

5 You must drive a battered green Land Rover at warp speed in steep-sided, narrow lanes with blind corners, howling drunk. Your dog, preferably a collie, must be in the passenger seat with its head hanging out of the window and tongue whipping in the tailwind. In the back you must keep an assortment of leads, tools and bales of hay. A Countryside Alliance sticker must be affixed by the number plate.

6 You must welcome all dogs into your house, wet or dry, and make endless allowances when other people's pee on sofas or maul babies. Remember, it is never, ever, the dog’s fault.

7 If engaged in conversation, avoid topics that mark you out as a townie, such as work or Westminster or culture. Join in with gusto when a farmer brings up scab/scrapie/staggers/spangles or other veterinary conditions at village dos. If someone says “the other day,” don’t look surprised if he is referring to an incident, often involving ferrets, from the middle of the last century.

8 Even though you have moved to the country to escape built-up areas, support those who want to carpet national parks and the nation’s few remaining areas of outstanding natural beauty with hideous, low-cost housing for locals. You must join in the loud complaints about how second-homers have driven up rural house prices, making country living unaffordable unless you work in town.

9 When the hunt churns up your meadows and breaks your gates down, rush out beaming and sweetly offer doubles all round.

10 Unless you want to be taken for a rich townie, follow all the above — and make sure you have wonky gates.

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