‘While others were building wings, my family wasn’t here’

GREAT ESTATES Hopetoun has changed very little in 250 years, as the present Earl tells Eleanor Doughty

What do you get if you cross a computergame-playing nuclear physicist with a 300-year-old Scottish estate? You get Andrew Hope, the Earl of Hopetoun, and his family’s 6,500acre domain.

It is tipping it down with rain, but Lord Hopetoun, 49, is all smiles as he pulls on his wellies for a romp around the grounds. There’s a lot to see: first, the 14-acre walled garden – “annoyingly the largest in Scotland, which is not what you want” – before a bowling green, which gets “very little use”, a similarly underused polo park, and then the West Lawn, where there was once an extravagant parterre, and a pond. “It’s a reflecting pond; if you stand above it, you see the house reflected in it.”

The house in question, Hopetoun, in South Queensferry, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, is a big one. There is some debate as to whether it has the longest facade in the country – that accolade may or may not belong to Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire. Nevertheless, it is giant, with more than 30 windows across the west side. It was built between 1699 and 1707, designed by Sir William Bruce for Scottish nobleman Charles Hope, later the 1st Earl of Hopetoun. The original house was expanded by William Adam, who in 1721 was commissioned to aggrandise the building, which was eventually completed by 1767.

Hopetoun has retained much of its original fabric. In the family apart- ments, “the run of bedrooms is the same run of rooms that the 2nd Earl slept in when he finished doing the house up”. There has been relatively little change at Hopetoun since, unlike at other properties. This is partly because, during the great building periods of history, Hopetoun’s custodians were generally absent. “My great- great-grandfather, the 1st Marquess of Linlithgow, was born in 1860. He was governor of Victoria by 1889, and then the first governor-general of Australia in 1901, so from 1890 to 1900 he was overseas, before he died in 1908.”

His son, the 2nd Marquess, was away too – as viceroy of India, from 1936 to 1943. “While other people were building wings, my family wasn’t about. During the periods of time in which it might easily have been altered, there wasn’t someone here with the impetus to do it.”

Lord Hopetoun took over from his father, the 4th Marquess of Linlithgow, in 2006. He studied physics at Oxford, specialising in nuclear physics, and upon graduation, went to work for the General Electric Company. He married Skye Bovill in 1993, and when their first child, Olivia, now 21, was born, they moved back to Scotland. ( There are now three other children too: Georgina, 20, and twins Charles, Viscount Aithrie, and Victor, 17.)

“We thought that if we were going to move out of London, I wanted to come home, so we came to live on the estate.” It wasn’t so much a predestined thing; “pre-destiny is a difficult topic for a scientist,” he jokes. “Why wouldn’t you want to come and live here?” His father moved out of the main house, into another property on the estate. “He felt that Hopetoun would be a nice thing for [my children] to grow up as a part of.”

It’s been 12 years now, and Lord Hopetoun still loves his job. “It’s something I thoroughly enjoy,” he beams. “Places like this benefit from having families in them, but if nobody had shown any interest in living here, I’m confident the place would have survived. I’m not arrogant enough to think that it would fall to pieces without me.”

It keeps him busy. As well as 100 residential let properties on the land, there’s an arable and livestock farm business, and a small shoot, plus another 20,000 acres elsewhere in Scotland. Then there are the public activities: the estate attracts between about 50,000 and 60,000 visitors a year, split between day visitors and those who come for larger events, such as the Christmas fair, as well as for weddings. One of the bookable spaces is the 300-seater ballroom, once an indoor riding school. “It’s an amazing resource to have,” says Lord Hopetoun. “We’re five miles from Edinburgh airport with a room that can seat 300.”

He is happy with the number of visitors to the estate every year. “If we had any more it would have a huge impact on the fabric of the house.” Crucially, Hopetoun, which is owned by a charity, the Hopetoun House Preservation Trust, is a home. “That balance becomes harder too, the more visitors you have,” he adds.

This costs a pretty penny, of course. The average annual cost is “probably seven figures”, but in recent years, Lord Hopetoun has managed to reduce the total. The installation of a woodchip boiler took the heating bill down from £80,000 a year to around £12,000.

The family haven’t had to do much to the house since they moved in. Structurally, the building was in good condition. A fire in the family apartments in the Seventies may have saved work, too. “It means that the plumbing and electrics are Seventies and not Fifties, or Thirties, which is a big bonus,” says Lord Hopetoun.

He looks surprised when asked whether the house has ever felt burdensome. No, it hasn’t. “It’s a joy. It’s a beautiful house,” he says. “It’s quite a privilege.”

‘I’m not arrogant enough to think that the place would fall to pieces without me’