Chatsworth

I went to Chatsworth for the pie. This sounds like I am deflecting from the obvious subject — one of England’s great houses, seat of the Devonshires for five centuries, the model for Darcy’s Pemberley in Jane Austen’s imagination — but the farmyard café pie is genuinely excellent and knowing this in advance made the whole enterprise feel more manageable. Grand country houses carry a weight of expectation that can make them feel like performance rather than place. Chatsworth earns its reputation, but I find it easier to arrive at the farmyard first, eat something, and approach the house from the garden side when I am already satisfied rather than trying to be impressed on an empty stomach.

The house itself is baroque, honey-stone, immense. It sits in a valley of the River Derwent that the first Duke had reshaped in the seventeenth century to be more picturesque — hills moved, river redirected, parkland planted according to Capability Brown’s principles of what a landscape should look like. The result is a valley that feels both natural and theatrical, the kind of landscape that exists to be looked at from the house and to frame the house from outside it simultaneously. Walking up from the river, the facade grows slowly and just keeps growing. The scale is intended to impress and it does, even when you are specifically trying not to let it.

Inside, the state rooms carry the accumulated weight of Devonshire collecting across five centuries: paintings by Rembrandt and Reynolds and Lucian Freud, whose portrait of the eleventh Duke hangs near older family portraits in a conversation across time. The library has the particular smell of leather and old paper that expensive libraries have. There is a carving in limewood by Grinling Gibbons in the chapel that I stared at for ten minutes — the detail impossible at human scale, the lace rendered in wood so finely that it moves in drafts. The current generation of Devonshires continues to add contemporary art alongside the old masters, which produces occasional incongruities that are more interesting than harmony would be.

But it is the garden that makes Chatsworth singular. The Cascade — a staircase of water running down a hillside through classical fountains — was designed in 1696 and still operates on gravity alone. The Emperor Fountain in the canal pond can reach sixty metres and is the tallest gravity-fed fountain in the world, which is the kind of fact that the Devonshires mention with the practiced understatement of people who have been mentioning it for a very long time. The kitchen garden, the rock garden, the cottage garden, the maze — the grounds contain enough variety for a full day’s serious walking without entering the house at all.

The estate village of Edensor, a ten-minute walk through the park, was relocated wholesale in the nineteenth century because the second Duke found it interfered with his view. The new village was built in a variety of architectural styles — Tudor, Italianate, Swiss chalet — by the estate’s architect, creating something that looks like a pattern book of Victorian rural fantasy rather than an organic settlement. It is genuinely strange and genuinely charming and contains a very good tea room in the old lodge building.

When to go: Late September to October for autumn colour in the parkland — the trees Brown planted two hundred years ago turn gold and copper around the house and the contrast with the pale stone is remarkable. Spring for the kitchen garden and early flowers. The Christmas market in November is extremely popular — Chatsworth does this well, but book ahead. Summer months are the busiest; arrive at opening time if you want the garden without crowds.