The modest Norfolk bolthole fit for a Queen
Instead of Balmoral, the monarch will this month lead a simpler life at Prince Philip’s beloved Wood Farm, writes Harry Mount
Like many of her subjects, the Queen opted for a seaside holiday this year. Her Majesty’s break, though, is slightly different from ours. This weekend, she will leave Balmoral Castle, her usual bolthole till the end of September, and head for Wood Farm, a modest cottage close to the Norfolk coastline on the Sandringham Estate.
There – until she returns to Buckingham Palace and official duties in October – the 94-year-old monarch will hunker down with Prince Philip, 99. The five-bedroom red-brick farmhouse has been his main residence since 2017, when he stood down from public duties.
By comparison with normal royal life in Buckingham Palace, Balmoral and Sandringham, life at Wood Farm is simple. Philip does not stand on ceremony and he has instituted a daily existence that’s far from the flummery of formal royal life. The staff don’t wear royal livery – and the Queen knows her way around the kitchen at Wood Farm. The monarch is a dab hand at domestic tasks.
“I was once at a shooting lunch,” a long-dead royal courtier told me once. “At the end of the meal, I heard someone say: ‘I’ll do the washing-up.’ I turned round and there was the Queen in her yellow washing-up gloves.”
Although the Queen has often stayed at Wood Farm with him – often for a week at the end of October – it is rare for her to spend time in Norfolk in September, which is “Balmoral time”. Sandringham is essentially the grandest of royal shooting lodges, and the season for pheasant doesn’t begin until Oct 1. During the shooting season, the Queen often helps out, standing behind the guns and picking up pheasants with her gundog.
One Sandringham guest, a courtier, told me: “It slightly concentrates your mind when you’re shooting and you know Her Majesty is standing behind you, seeing how good, or bad, a shot you are.”
But, with no shooting, the Queen and Prince Philip will have plenty of time on their own together. Prince Philip can devote himself to his new-found pleasure: his truffle farm at Sandringham which, after 12 years of his attentions, is now producing a valuable, annual haul of black truffles.
Before her summer stay at Balmoral, the
Queen had been at
Windsor Castle, protected from
Covid-19, with
Prince Philip and a small household staff since March. For four months, before decamping to
Balmoral, they remained at the castle in the isolated group, nicknamed
“HMS Bubble”.
The monarch had minimal royal duties at Windsor – apart from her stirring addresses to the nation over coronavirus and the 75th anniversary of VE Day, her Zoom meetings with the public and other members of the Royal Family and her July investiture of Captain Sir Tom Moore. Prince Philip, too, made rare forays into the limelight at Windsor Castle in July, for the wedding of his granddaughter Princess Beatrice, and to hand over his role as Colonel-inChief of the Rifles Regiment to the Duchess of Cornwall. Their enforced stay at Windsor and Balmoral was clearly such a hit that they’ve decided to extend their summer at Wood Farm. It won’t be a complete holiday, though. The Queen will still inspect her red boxes, as she has dutifully done since coming to the throne in 1952. She will be kept in touch with the affairs of her government, via Sir Edward Young, her private secretary. And she will still have her weekly audiences over the phone with Boris Johnson. Otherwise, though, her Wood Farm break will be a far cry from her normal, hectic palace life. Wood Farm is a decent-sized farmhouse but it’s nothing compared with the vast grandeur of neighbouring Sandringham House. Bought by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, in 1862, Sandringham was rebuilt in 1870 in what the Pevsner guide calls a “frenetic Jacobean” style. With its ballroom, billiard room and bowling alley, it is a great, big, Victorian mammoth of a schloss.
But, if you drive through Sandringham’s imposing Norwich Gates, topped with the royal coat of arms, past the great house for several miles, near the village of Wolferton, only a short walk from the sea, there you’ll find Wood Farm, built in handsome, vernacular style of brown bricks and beige roof tiles.
“It’s right down on the coast, quite remote, very ungrand,” says Hugo Vickers, biographer of the Duchess of Windsor and Queen Mary, who has seen Wood Farm.
“The Queen actually goes there quite a lot. It’s a myth to say Prince Philip is sitting there all by himself. She quite often goes up on the train to see him.” Wood Farm has been part of the royal landholdings ever since the
Prince of Wales bought the house in 1862. Prince John, the tragic youngest child of George V and Queen Mary, lived at Wood Farm until his premature death in 1919, from epilepsy, aged only 13. He often went from Wood Farm to visit his grandmother, Queen Alexandra, at Sandringham.
Wood Farm was a tenant farm until 50 years ago. That was when Prince Philip happened to spot the household staff all leaving Sandringham House at the end of a royal stay there. He was horrified by the number of cooks, valets and maids needed to service the big house.
And so he decided to take over Wood Farm – where the last tenant farmer’s lease had just come to an end. Sandringham House continues to be used at Christmas and for big house gatherings and shooting parties.
Prince Charles likes to take the big house for literary weekends with leading writers. But, when it’s just Prince Philip and the Queen on the estate, it’s more economical to stay at Wood Farm.
“It’s much more modest – a much more normal life – at Wood Farm,” says Vickers. “It isn’t minute, but the furniture is modest, which they rather like.”
Prince Philip hasn’t done his beloved carriage-driving under lockdown, but his fellow carriagedriving enthusiast, Lady Romsey, often visits him at Wood Farm. He is clearly devoted to the place: in the summer of 2019, he got rather bored up at Balmoral with the endless round of visitors, and decamped to Wood Farm rather earlier than usual.
Other members of the Royal Family are more devoted to Balmoral. “The Queen Mother used to dread leaving Balmoral and going back south again, when the leaves go red and autumn breezes begin,” says Vickers, the Queen Mother’s biographer.
This year at Balmoral there were visitors – the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge came with their family, as did the Wessexes.
And now, at Wood Farm, for the Queen and Prince Philip, it will be a return to what they both think of as one of the happiest, most normal times in their lives, from 1949 to 1951, which they spent on Malta.
There, Prince Philip was a young naval officer and the then Princess Elizabeth was a wife and mother to Prince Charles and Princess Anne, before her life of duty really took over on coming to the throne in 1952.
And so, for a brief spell in their 73-year marriage, the Queen and Prince Philip are once again relatively free of duties and beside the sea. What bliss!
‘It’s right down on the coast, quite remote, very ungrand. She often goes up on the train’