Lord Edward Manners pulls his Land Rover up the hill into the medieval parkland of Haddon Hall. The top view looks like a complete idyll.
Down the valley is the River Wye and Haddon next to it, twitching with wild rainbow trout.
We are here to observe how the park is being “de-farmed” or perhaps cleared of agriculture. Hedges, the old dividing lines between areas that were once fields farmed by tenants, are being removed to return the landscape to open space.
“I don’t like the word ‘rewilding’,” says Lord Edward. “What we’re doing here is the restoration of parkland.”
It is a project that Lord Edward is particularly passionate about, but it is only one part of a 30-year restoration plan he launched in the late 1990s.
“We have now completed our 20th anniversary,” he says. “We know which parts to pick and in what order, and we can do most of that through cash flow.”
This is helped by the popular artisan markets held at Haddon and bat-watching evenings in the 12th-century chapel, as well as the Peacock hotel in Rowsley, which Lord Edward bought a few minutes down the road.
The house is open to the public from March to October and the estate includes 80 dwellings, two quarries and 20 miles of riverside on 3,800 acres in a very popular part of Derbyshire.
Being a suitable family home provides Haddon with much needed additional warmth.
Lord Edward married entrepreneur Gabrielle Ross in 2013 and five years later they moved to Haddon with their two children, becoming the first family to live in the house full-time since the 17th century.
His wife’s first encounter with Haddon left a lasting impression.
Lady Edward says: “Haddon has both a masculine and feminine side. As you approach it from the driveway, it’s a large, solid defensive wall, quite intimidating with its rocky sheer cliff.
“But if you approach from the other side, you see the romantic, beautiful side of Bombay glass shining through where it catches the light. “I remember being amazed by her beauty.”
He remembers Haddon being completely asleep during his first visit. “All the furniture had dust covers. Felt like we were walking through a fairytale castle that wasn’t awake [for years].”
Needless to say, Haddon wasn’t an easy house to live in. Lady Edward says when she first moved in with her young sons, the house was “extremely cold” and she found herself wearing ski clothes inside.
“But this is a house you want to live in with a family,” he says, so this is where they should stay. “He needs kids, he needs love, he needs energy.”
The inevitable aspect of the building is its extraordinary age.
“’How can this be real, how can this survive?’ you think. “This is a very old thing, and it gets inside you, affects you.”
Medieval signs on doorways indicate “whether or not you are allowed in.” [if you were part of the family]or you weren’t [as staff]. “It was a rule if you couldn’t read or write,” he says.
As the family went to bed, “we naturally found ourselves gravitating towards the rooms the family would use. This is so wonderful, these are the footsteps of the past, you cannot hear them, but you can still follow them.”
Some rooms have the feel and smell of a cathedral; Woody, slightly musty, but with the ancient feeling brought by monasteries and courtyard buildings.
The relatively new building on the hill, visible for miles, is so different from Belvoir. As Lady Edward noted, “Haddon is so old they didn’t build it for an ego.”
Haddon has been in the Manners family for 461 years.
It was never sold, only passed down through lineage; first through the Vernon family, who bought the estate in 1170 and built the house, then through the Mannerses after the heiress Dorothy Vernon married Thomas’s second son, Sir John Manners. Manners, 1st Earl of Rutland, who lived at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire in the 1560s.
Despite his long history within one of England’s oldest families, Haddon was not always the center of the Manners universe.
After the Whig politician John Manners, 9th Earl of Rutland, was created Duke of Rutland in 1703, the family moved en masse to Belvoir. They closed Haddon down, not to return in any meaningful way until the early 20th century.
Thus Haddon fell into his deep sleep.
In the 1920s, Lord Edward’s grandfather, John Manners, 9th Duke of Rutland, realized his long-standing ambition to restore Haddon as a family home, modernizing it with electricity and running water, installing tennis courts and eventually moving in with his family. did.
However, he died in 1940 at the age of 53 and was succeeded by his 21-year-old son Charles.
During the war both Haddon and Belvoir were used as warehouses by the Public Records Office – an agreement made by John Rutland to prevent them from becoming barracks and therefore being thrown away – and Haddon was otherwise mothballed.
During Lord Edward’s childhood, his father, Charles Rutland, ruled both Belvoir and Haddon.
Matthew Parris, the former MP for West Derbyshire, remembered the Duke as “a supremely ruthless chairman” of local Conservative Party meetings, who “dealt things out with lively politeness and a steely gaze”.
His son says Charles Rutland was “a true gentleman, a magnificent man of great charm and charisma.” “He was very well-liked and very easy to get along with.”
When Charles Rutland inherited the dukedom in 1940, it was with two magnificent houses at Belvoir and Haddon, along with other estates. His younger brother, Lord John Manners, had the right to use Haddon for life, but the system was flawed.
Lord Edward says: “There was some confusion between my father and my uncle about Haddon as to what my uncle’s rights were in it, what he was to pay for, and what my father was to pay for.”
“This regulation was a fairly new thing at the time. It sort of worked, but only required a bit or two of pushback [to fall apart] and then there would be a big fight.
Charles Rutland decided that this would not happen to his sons if he could help it, and decided that Belvoir and Haddon would separate.
Belvoir would cross the main line and remain with the Duke of Rutland (from 1999 Lord Edward’s older brother David) and Haddon would become Lord Edward’s.
The situation now is that Haddon is Lord Edward’s house and will not return to the dukedom on his death, but will instead pass to one of his own children.
I shudder in the chapel where John Rutland discovered 15th-century murals; One can see how extraordinary these remain today.
John Rutland continues to be an inspiration to Lady Edward. “When I look back at his work and the notes he wrote, I think about his passion, his determination and what he did in a very short time. “That’s probably the driving force behind me being here.”