Yorkshire's stately Bridgerton home with a quirky turret stay

Times

03-05-2025

As I peer up at the dome of Castle Howard, the screen-famous stately home that occupies an 8,800-acre estate 15 miles northeast of York, I take in a scene from the ancient Greek myth of the fallof Phaeton, frescoed across its interior.
This 70ft centrepiece is one of the many design statements that the British statesman Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, brought to North Yorkshire in the early 18th century to create an 'Italian palace in Yorkshire'. To do so he enlisted the help of the radical architect and dramatist John Vanbrugh, alongside Nicholas Hawksmoor, the designer behind Blenheim Palace and the west towers of Westminster Abbey.
Some 300 years on, this country house has starred in multiple film and TV series, including the period drama Brideshead Revisited, made in the Eighties, and the Netflix series Bridgerton. At the end of April, as part of its ambitious 21st Century Renaissance project, it opened its doors to its newly refurbished tapestry drawing room. And next year the house will be available for occasional private rent, allowing holidaymakers to step into the lives of its present custodians, Nicholas and Victoria Howard, while enjoying the setting in the Howardian Hills, one of England's 46 national landscapes, which are protected for their natural beauty. Prices are on request but you can imagine it's suitably expensive.
For those of us without such deep pockets there's the new Hinds House, a former gamekeeper's cottage, which is where I'm settling in for a weekend with my husband and two children. It's the newest of Castle Howard's stays, which also include a caravan and campsite with holiday homes, plus six other cottages in nearby villages. Hinds House is by far its quirkiest, forming part of a turret in the estate's original mock medieval walls, built by the 18th-century architect John Carr, who also designed Derbyshire's Buxton Crescent and West Yorkshire's Harewood House.
As we drive along the poker-straight avenue to Castle Howard, it brings back memories of day trips here as a child — I grew up some 30 miles north, in the North York Moors. Down a narrow country lane, a large field's distance south of Castle Howard itself, we find the house. It sits beside a walled garden of lavender, with a private lawn containing a weeping birch tree that the children sneak beneath.
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Inside, the cottage is filled with vintage pieces from the stately home. Walls are lined with replica wallpaper from the estate's archives and portraits of earls who have lived at Castle Howard. They keep a watchful eye over the children as they dance around dressers filled with antique china. The living room exudes vintage maximalism, with ornaments and pots dotting the surfaces, and a total of — yes, we counted — 17 lampshades. Elsewhere, modern striped fabrics, pompom-fringed curtains and Pooky-style lampshades, along with French grey painted cottage doors, balance out the time-warp chintz. I retreat to the copper bathtub in the most impressive of its two bathrooms — the one whose curved stone walls form part of the turret — for a soak. The kitchen, meanwhile, has a modern country feel, with a massive Smeg fridge, a rustic farmhouse table, framed pictures of cockerels and views of hopping rabbits. Its Aga keeps us toasty and cooks our Yorkshire bacon, from Castle Howard's farm shop, within minutes.
You could easily spend a weekend relaxing in this quirky property but you'd miss out if you didn't delve into Castle Howard's 600 acres of parkland, whose Pyramid folly and colonnaded mausoleum — where some 30 members of the Howard family are interred — can be seen from the cottage. It's in the parkland that we find several head-turning features including an 80ft-tall obelisk and a stone fountain featuring a huge figure of the Titan Atlas. The caw of electric-blue peacocks echoes throughout.
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We dodge muddy puddles through the pine-scented Ray Wood, where candyfloss-coloured petals unfurl from giant rhododendrons. Their gigantic leaves delight my six-year-old daughter, who plucks them from the forest floor. She and her five-year-old brother race down the wood's steep hill while I soak up its extraordinary view of Castle Howard's baroque architecture. They coax me over a bridge that wobbles across the waterfowl-filled waters of Skelf Island, the estate's adventure playground. In summer you can join the queues for boat trips over the Great Lake: a prime opportunity for birdwatching and enjoying views of the property's north-facing façade, whose entrance appeared in Bridgerton (adults £6; children £4).
I walk around the house too, which is free for one day for guests staying at Hinds House. Some of its rooms were destroyed during a fire in 1940 but the dome, with its fresco, was rebuilt in 1962. In the Eighties, filming of Brideshead Revisited funded reconstruction of the garden hall and new library.
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The new tapestry drawing room features cyan walls with a striking gold entablature, its frieze inspired by Vanbrugh's decoration in the great hall and the Roman Ara Pacis (altar of peace), a monument now housed in its own museum in Rome. A specialist conservator has stabilised the tapestries, which depict the four seasons. Other rooms — including the long gallery and grand staircase — have had a complete refurb and rehang of paintings, with Grand Tour treasures from Roman busts to mosaics added and rearranged.
Aside from its extraordinary country house, the Howardian Hills have become synonymous with high-quality local food and drink. North Yorkshire's food capital of Malton, which has the tagline 'a town of makers and markets', is a ten-minute drive from Castle Howard and is celebrated for its raft of artisan producers and independent shops. The town's Shambles takes you back in time, with tiny antique stores housed in former stables. Here I drop into the Woodlark and pick up a beautifully carved oak cheeseboard, its label telling me 'provenance: the Castle Howard estate' (thewoodlark.com).
There's also a clutch of Michelin-starred restaurants, lauded for their use of the area's rich natural larder. During our stay we visit a newcomer, Restaurant Mýse, a renovated 19th-century pub in Hovingham helmed by the North Yorkshire lad Joshua Overington, for its 17-course tasting menu (from £145; restaurantmyse.co.uk). The restaurant's ethos is 'micro seasonality' and it uses foraged ingredients, such as wild mushrooms, medlars and apples, from the Castle Howard estate. The doughnut-like braised ox cheek in Yorkshire pudding batter, and the chicken drippings — into which we dunk sourdough — are heavenly. The crab custard topped with various pickled, fermented, salted and braised mushrooms ignites taste buds I didn't know I possessed. The standout dessert is the Jerusalem artichoke ice cream, its birch sap also collected from Castle Howard.
On our final day the kids have one last run around Castle Howard's serene gardens, whose towering box hedges make for excellent hide and seek. Behind us the dome's 23.5-carat gold leaf cupola lantern glistens in the sun and we catch a glimpse of Hinds House, which the children now affectionately call 'our little old-fashioned house', across the field.
A grand historic house like Castle Howard is forever a work in progress. I look forward to seeing what Nicholas and Victoria Howard decide to do with the other rooms of Yorkshire's Italian palace.Lucy McGuire was a guest of Hinds House, which has one night's self-catering for six from £250 (castlehoward.co.uk), and the Yorkshire Arboretum
Castle Howard provides maps of the various hiking trails you can take, through pretty villages such as Ganthorpe, Coneysthorpe and Slingsby, as well as through ancient woodland filled with bluebells in April and May (howardianhills.org.uk).
This 120-acre garden is two minutes from Castle Howard and is known for its red squirrel enclosure, where you can listen to talks with 'squirrel volunteers' as you watch the new colony of kits (babies) being fed. Trail tree maps lead you on walks across the rare tree-filled park known for its critically endangered Australian wollemi pines (£12; yorkshirearboretum.org).
Tastings and demos with local chefs and MasterChef semi-finalists such as Olayemi Adelekan feature at this annual event. Arrive hungry, browse stalls of local produce and enjoy live music with a drink from a red double-decker bus (May 24-26; free; visitmalton.com).
With commanding views over the Vale of York — and, if you squint, York Minster — this peaceful, elevated farm in Terrington, a ten-minute drive west of Castle Howard, has tea rooms, themed gardens and swathes of the perfumed purple flower (£5 in May; £7 June-August; yorkshirelavender.com).