Marcus Carlisle — April 18, 1948- November 18, 2025

TO describe Marcus “Mark” Carlisle simply as a rural chartered surveyor significantly sells him short. He was a man of many parts, some delightfully raffish.

Nevertheless, he gained a formidable reputation in his chosen field and was considered by many to be the best land agent in the South of England.

A sharp intellect combined with an ability to see things from unlikely perspectives meant that he never suffered a lack of clients, many of whom become lifelong friends.

Remarkably (and possibly uniquely) he had turned down a place at Pembroke College Cambridge to pursue his career — a decision he did not regret though in later life occasionally reflected on.

His expertise encompassed not just agriculture and agricultural law, but local history, planning and heritage, residential and commercial property, family trusts and succession, nature and environmental issues.

He had a particular knowledge of and deep connection with the area in which he lived most of his life — South Oxfordshire — whose rural beauty he saw become increasingly endangered.

Mark was born in Maidenhead to Squadron Leader Anthony Francis Carlisle and Dora May Dalzell (“Ann”). His father was a highly decorated RAF pilot who flew many of the famous Mosquito missions of the Second World War including Operation Carthage in Copenhagen, one of the most daring bombing missions of the whole war.

A bright but rebellious boy (Mark was rusticated repeatedly at Kelly College for his fondness for poaching) it was working as a local farmhand (to his father’s despair) that gave him his introduction to land management and set the course of his lifetime’s work. He secured a job at local firm Lawrence, Son and Laird where, his abilities becoming rapidly apparent, he became partner at the age of 24.

In the early Eighties he played a key role in orchestrating a merger with Simmons and Sons, a long-established land and estate agency based in Henley, and oversaw an expansion of the business to 12 different locations.

The estate agency was successfully sold to Parkers in Reading. A cancer diagnosis in his forties (from which he fully recovered) then changed the course of his career and, after a period in a senior role at Savills’ Henley office, he left to become resident agent at the Mapledurham estate just outside Reading.

Mapledurham had been in the Eyston family for many generations and was a large mixed estate that he transformed over several years, establishing a number of diversified enterprises and revitalising the property aspect of the estate. He also took on the Hendred Estate on the Berkshire Downs, in the same family ownership.

At Mapledurham he pioneered a progressive method of power generation for the estate, installing in the ancient mill a thoroughly modern Archimedean screw turbine. At the time the turbine was inaugurated in 2012, it was the most powerful turbine on the River Thames, and the largest of its type in the country.

To achieve this he had to fight a prolonged planning battle on the question of who owned the riverbed. Mark researched the family’s archives and found a 15th century document confirming that, most unusually, it did indeed belong to the owners of the estate.

He met his wife, Moira Gellatly (known to all as “Ming”), at a mutual friends’ wedding. She a sophisticated Londoner, disc jockey at Annabel’s and Julianna’s, who had lived in New York and Rome; he a local lad four years her junior.

To their friends it seemed an improbable match, but they were to remain married for more than 50 years, having three daughters, Amy (interior designer), Jessica (lawyer) and Clemency (executive assistant), and leading an active social life through Ming’s legendary hospitality, wonderful cooking and Mediterranean chic.

Mark was a thoughtful man, charming and friendly but also private. He was perhaps happiest in the company of old friends and family (not just his three daughters but his sons-in-law and seven young grandchildren) and dogs.

One of his favourite pastimes was shooting and he owned perhaps the naughtiest Labrador in the country. Eventually he was too ashamed to even bring him out on his home shoot. Bertie, always fondly remembered, was responsible for many a domestic catastrophe, the pinnacle being burning the kitchen down.

He took a great interest in people’s lives and always had something insightful to say. He loved music (Brahms, Bach, occasional acid jazz) and bridge, good food and fine wine, particularly Burgundy.

He was also a card-carrying petrol-head and owned and drove — with spirit — a succession of interesting cars ranging from a 1924 chain-driven GN cycle car to a 512 BB Ferrari. In 1990 he participated in the Mille Miglia in his newly restored Aston Martin DB 2/4.

He was diagnosed in his sixties with multiple sclerosis, a disease that had lain latent over decades but gradually became progressive. At around the same time Ming received her own diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Not long afterwards, the couple sold the family home in Ewelme to move into a listed converted stable block.

Bearing his illness with striking fortitude and never losing his good humour, it was living here, beside landscaped parkland and adjacent to the farms he knew so well, that he found great happiness, reconciled to the implications of his condition but never dominated by it.

It was entirely characteristic that his wheelchair was made by Williams F1. In keeping with his clear-eyed pragmatism and courage, he chose to end his life in Switzerland and died at Dignitas in November.

Marcus Roy Carlisle, FRICS, Land Agent was born on April 18, 1948 and died on November 18, 2025, in Zurich, aged 77.