‘I want it to have the heartbeat of a village’

GREAT ESTATES It’s been the family seat for 500 years and costs £500,000 to run – Eleanor Doughty visits the Duchess of Rutland’s castle home

The Duchess of Rutland might have lived at Belvoir Castle for nearly 20 years, but she is still as down to earth as the next Lincolnshire farmer. Or, rather, a Welsh one. Raised on a farm in Powys, it is this aspect of her extraordinarily busy life with which she most strongly identifies. “I know I’m seen as a duchess,” she says, “but in my mind, I’m still Emma Watkins from the hills.”

In 1992, she married the 11th Duke of Rutland, David Manners, and together they had five children (Ladies Violet, 25; Alice, 23, who is a columnist for The Telegraph; and Eliza, 21; Charles, Marquess of Granby, 19; and Lord Hugo Manners, 15).

Belvoir Castle ver”), on the colnshire border, has been the home of the Manners family since 1508, when it was inherited by George Manners; his son Thomas became the 1st Earl of Rutland in 1525 (the dukedom came in 1703).

There have been many incarnations of this building: in 1528, construction began on a second castle, to replace the ruined Norman original. When this, too, was destroyed, by Parliamentarians in 1649, a third castle was built, before, in 1799, the fourth took shape, to designs by neoclassical architect James Wyatt. After a fire in 1816, the house was rebuilt to Wyatt’s design, and stands today as it did then, with its lavish state rooms – including an opulent saloon in the style of Louis XIV.

When the 10th Duke died in 1999, the next generation moved in: three girls under 10, and a fourth baby on the way. There was no handover. “My mother-in-law gave me a rusty box of keys and said ‘good luck’,” says the Duchess. Then, the house was open to the public 200 days a year, but the Duchess, who runs the estate business, decided to take action, and virtually closed public access for the next seven years. Instead, Belvoir was to become an exclusive overnight destination. “At our farmhouse in Wales we did bed and breakfast, so bums in beds is important to me,” she says. She took 14 bedrooms of the 356-room castle and made them available to hire for weddings, parties, and corporate events. Now, the castle is open for more than 100 days a year, and attracts about 20,000 visitors.

The Duke and Duchess separated in 2012, but remain on good terms, living at Belvoir in opposite wings. “David and I are best friends. There’s nothing that we don’t discuss and don’t know about what’s happening in each other’s lives,” the Duchess says. “He is absolutely involved at Belvoir, he just doesn’t want to do this bit.” By ‘ this bit’, she means the running of the 16,000-acre estate, with its wedding business, 350 residential properties (about 7,000 people live on Belvoir land), and a 6,000-acre grouse moor in Derbyshire.

The portfolio has expanded again, to include the Engine Yard, the Duchess’s latest commercial venture, which opened this past summer. It is a collection of estate buildings – the former sawmill, wagon-makers and wheelwright’s shop – that have been transformed into a retail space.

Over the years, the Duchess began to fall in love with the buildings. “I think I am more in love with them than I am with the castle, to be honest.” She began to do them up, advertising the spaces as commercial units, and now there are 13 units in business, including the Idle Mole garden centre, a farm shop, a coffee producer, a chocolatier and a day spa. She has also turned an old Romany caravan into a “wellness wagon” for herbal therapies, and there’s a house on the site earmarked for a cookery school. It’s a bit like Daylesford, but in Lincolnshire. “That is what terrifies me,” the Duchess says with a grin.

Her vision for the Engine Yard is more than a shopping park. “I want it to have the heartbeat of a village,” she says, explaining that she’d like to see locals bring items to barter with in the square. “I’d like for this little village to support everything that anyone on the estate does, in the local farms and properties. Then you would never feel the need to go and leave Belvoir.”

The project has cost £2.4 million, and the castle costs £500,000 a year to run. Eight years ago, to help with funds, the Duke and Duchess sold a painting by Poussin, which “restarted the engine. It wiped out the debt but didn’t give us any working capital.” Since then, they’ve spent money on a new grouse moor, on a £250,000 project to complete Lancelot “Capability” Brown’s work in the Belvoir park, as well as the conversion of the hunt stables into retirement properties. But last year, for the first time in 18 years, they broke even.

Although the surrounding area is certainly not short of stately homes – within 20 miles there’s Fulbeck Hall, Holme Pierrepont Hall and Kelham Hall – there is nevertheless something special about being people’s “local stately”.

The future for Belvoir is well catered for. The Duchess has tried to instill a “zero-chippiness” policy in her children: “I cannot bear it in siblings in these heritage buildings. Life is much too exciting to get upset that you didn’t inherit. In so many ways, it’s a burden.”

Her daughters are “very relieved” about not inheriting. She hopes that Lord Granby, who has just started university, will have an easier time running Belvoir than she has had. “I want him to go away and learn – set up his own business or work for someone who is tough on him. Then he can come back with a bit of knowledge under his belt.”

This was not her experience. “I’d run an interior decorating business, dropped out of being an opera singer, dropped out of being a land agent. I hadn’t got a huge track record. Where do you go to learn to be a duchess?” She is relaxed about the title. “I respect everything about it, and that people want to call you ‘ Your Grace’. They enjoy that, and I’m not taking it away from anyone.”

Those of her peer group who insist upon it, she says, “that’s when the surroundings become them. You have to be you, instead of letting the building carry you.”

The Duke and Duchess separated in 2012 but remain on good terms, living in separate wings

How to play Basics: Griddlers are solved using number clues to locate solids (filled-in squares) and dots (empty squares) to reveal a picture.

Each column and row has a series of numbers next to it. These refer to the number of adjacent squares that should be filled as solids. If more than one number appears, that line will contain more than one block of solids.

The solid blocks must appear in the order that the numbers are printed. For example, a row that contains the numbers 11.5 would contain, somewhere, a block of 11 adjacent filled-in squares (solids), then a gap of one or more empty squares (with dots in) and then a block of five adjacent filled-in squares.

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A convicted poacher has been ordered by a US judge to watch which film once a month while he is in jail? (a) The Deer Hunter (b) Bambi (c) The Fox and the Hound

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