Eluned Price My rags-to-riches Royal hideaway
He first visited as a nervous lad clutching linen samples – little realising that one day he’d own the place
ANDREW Bottomley was, by his own admission, ‘a mere slip of a lad’ when he called d at the house in the tiny hamlet of Beltingham,am, near Hexham in Northumberland, and, in 1985. Staggering under the weightight of the sample books of ‘linens in apricot colours’ he had been asked ed to bring, he entered the small,, square sitting room, which was thick with smoke.
‘I have a friend staying,’ said Lady Mary Bowes-Lyon, a cousin of the Queen Mother. It was Lady Mary who had ordered the samples and the ‘friend’, a woman in her 50s, was sitting on the floor.
The friend and Lady Mary leafed ed through the pattern books for somemething apricot to be made up as loose oose covers for an armchair. The friend,end, who was not introduced to Andrew, rew, was impressed with his knowledge dge and advice. ‘It’s a pity you’re not in London,’ she said.
‘It was only when I had left that I realised who the friend was,’ he says – it was Princess Margaret who had been visiting the property, Grade II listed Beltingham House. ‘I’d been to quite a lot of houses in the county for the interior designs business I’d just started,’ Andrew recalls. ‘I thought it was the nicest. Not a freezing, rambling stately home, more a Georgian doll’s house. I remember thinking it would be amazing to own – little realising I would!’
It was 25 years later that Andrew did purchase the house with elder brother Michael, with whom he runs Compleat Interiors, a hand-made furniture business. Lady Mary had died and her branch of the BowesLyon family decided to sell.
‘It had been on the market for about six months,’ says Michael. ‘It was so beautiful – and extremely rare for untouched houses to come on the market. Since it was exactly the kind we work on all the time, it represented the perfect example to show to clients – once we’d restored it. At the same time it had to earn its keep, so we decided to let it out for private hire. Mostly it is let for weekends for family celebrations. We’ve also let it steadily for fishing and shooting parties.’
Beltingham House was originally the dower house – where the widow of an estate-owner would often move after the death of her husband – for nearby Ridley Hall.
It was built in 1760 mainly from Northumberland stone, which, says Andrew, ‘was probably taken out of Hadrian’s Wall, just over a mile down the road – it was common practice with houses in the area’.
The main part of the house has a drawing room extending into a reading room, a dining room and a kitchen/breakfast room, all with original fireplaces and stone mullion sash windows. To the west side are two extensions, one built by Lady Mary’s husband, and an earlier wing built by his father. These provide a further two sitting rooms and two kitchens.
The pattern is repeated upstairs with four en suite b bedrooms in the main house a and a further three bedrooms an and bathroom. T The property, which is now on the m market at £1.35million, needed a lot of work when the brothers boug bought it, including rewiring, and new h heating and plumbing.
At t the front of the house is a cottage garden and summerhouse; at the rear, trees shelter a large lawn. A path leads through an orchard to the original walled garden and an arbour. A woodland walk leads to one of two paddocks, both let to a local farmer. In all, the grounds cover almost five acres.
A stone wall separates the garden from St Cuthbert’s Church, which is 1,100 years old. The church was merely a village chapel until 875, when the monks of Lindisfarne fled Danish marauders, taking with them the body of their bishop, St Cuthbert. They hid the body in the yew tree of the chapel overnight before making their way to Durham Cathedral. The chapel was renamed in honour of the saint, and the yew stands.
A plaque in the churchyard commemorates the planting of a tree by the Queen Mother in 1989, but of course there were also more frequent private visits by her to Ridley Hall and Beltingham, to see her family.
‘Beltingham House has been a pleasure but it’s done its job for us,’ says Michael. ‘It is time for us to take on another project.’