Wendy Bennett can still remember seeing Augill Castle for the first time. Set in the heart of the Eden Valley in Cumbria, the late summer sun seemed to make it glow against a backdrop of rolling hills.

The house, a folly built in the 1840s by John Bagot Pearson, “a gentleman of leisure and considerable means” who wanted to entertain his friends in the style of a medieval banquet, was not derelict but “severely unloved”.

It had been chopped up into flats in the 1970s and, more recently, lain empty for four years. There were 135 burst pipes, dry rot and mushrooms in the roof. But Bennett didn’t care: to her, the house represented escape. In London, she and her husband Simon led a frenetic existence.

As a senior recruitment consultant, Wendy spent long hours in the office and faced a daily grind on the overcrowded Tube. Simon was co-owner of Mayfair’s Curzon Street Restaurant, which often ate up 16 hours of his day.

“It was as if we couldn’t breathe,” says Wendy. “Every day was so busy we hardly saw each other. We were beginning to find London increasingly oppressive.”

Simon was just as unhappy. “The cost of living was ridiculously high,” he says, “and every day there was a new problem. On a Tube strike day it took me 3½ hours to drive four miles from Hammersmith to Mayfair.

I tried cycling but I almost got killed in the traffic. We wanted to start a family but we were both permanently exhausted. I couldn’t see how children could fit into our lives.”

Flicking through Country Life they spotted Augill — 12 bedrooms and 15 acres of land — on sale for just over £200,000, the then price of a three-bedroomed terraced house in west London, where they lived.

All Simon knew about Cumbria was that it “was on the way to Scotland”, but within weeks they had swapped city suits for fleeces, wellies and overalls. Augill is now restored and the Bennetts have turned it into a superior B&B. They now have two children, Oliver, 4, and Emily, 2, and what seems to them a blissfully relaxed existence. “We were lucky; we didn’t think too much about it, we just got on and did it,” says Wendy. “It’s only scary in retrospect.”

They did not know it, but when the Bennetts gave up their high- flying jobs in 1997 they were trailblazers for what has become an established and growing movement. Downshifting — leaving the rat race for a more simple and relaxed, if poverty-stricken lifestyle — has become more than a dream for millions of people in Britain.

Research by Datamonitor, the market analysts, estimates that some 2.6m Britons are “downshifters”, up from 1.7m in 1997, when the “quiet revolt against the culture of getting and spending” began. The movement is now so well established that Datamonitor predicts we will have 3.7m downshifters by 2007, part of a movement of 12m people across Europe.

Such numbers suggest almost a reverse of the industrial revolution, when people flocked to cities to find work. The advance of technology has made working from home a real possibility for many people, but the movement seems to be driven less by the desire for a new career as an emotional meltdown in the cities.

Britons work the longest hours in Europe and as our transport system becomes ever more unreliable — not to say downright dangerous — even getting to work is a source of frustration. Many people feel their lives have been taken over by work. A report by the Mental Health Foundation (MHF), released this week, will say that despite much talk about “work-life balance”, many people are still working 50-60 hours a week and feel their lives are out of control.