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Famous for its deer park, nature reserve and golden sands (along which a horse ride is almost obligatory), the estate is a fine exampl of an English stately home that has really ‘made things work.’ It’s also an incredibly romantic part of the country to drop bags in and explore, not in the main house (please), but in one of the Victoria’s reasonably priced rooms (the estate’s on-site hotel), its self-catered shepherd huts, or, one of the eight lodges dotted around the estate (the William Kent-designed Triumphal Arch wins in the period drama stakes.
And it can also be yours, for a night or two — a room in the hotel at least (an 18th century lodge revived in cosy, country house style), or Hounds Lodge, where fires roar, drinks trollies wait impatiently by draped curtains and rooms with Narnia-like wardrobes are decked in heritage fabrics and eiderdown quilts.
Passed like a shiny baton down the centuries between the Dukes of Richmond, the estate had the good fortune of falling into the hands of switched-on heir, Charles Henry Gordon-Lennox (the 11th Duke) at a time when most of the UK’s stately homes were falling into the hands of the National Trust.
Whatever your political leanings, no one can deny the aesthetic reverie of it all; the architectural crescendos of our recent history; the rose gardens; the drawing room views across Capability Brown-sketched gardens, towards swans gliding on lakes.
For those of us whose ancestors failed to hover close enough to Charles II’s court as he doled out titles, visiting a stately pile can have the Brideshead effect: a wide-eyed, dry-mouthed ogle at the architectural splendour, the watercolour gardens and sheer grandeur of it all.
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