A Day at Castle Howard / Brideshead

After a delicious cooked breakfast, we filled in the time before Castle Howard opened at 11am with a walk around parts of the estate outside the gates. This five-mile walk was followed by more than another mile of walking to the entrance to Castle Howard. It was a warm morning and, after such exertions, we stopped for a drink at the Courtyard Cafe. Well our intention was to have just a drink but Ian was tempted by the rhubarb and custard icecream so I had to follow suit and have a warm chocolate fudge cake - that's my version of what happened anyway!

For the next three hours we toured the house, taking photos inside and out and listening to the very knowledgeable guides as we encountered them in various rooms. Highlights included the Great Hall (with its massive carved columns and dome above, where light flooded down to illuminate murals by Antonio Pellegrini), the Turquoise Drawing Room (which was recently redecorated with beautiful turquoise and gold damask wallpaper and upholstery) and the Chapel (with four Burne-Jones stained glass windows in the Arts and Craft style).

The Great Hall

The Turquoise Drawing Room

Chapel window

But of course the absolute highlight for me was the display in two upper rooms of the making of the Granada television series of Brideshead Revisited and also the more recent movie. This was an exhibition called 'Brideshead Restored: The Story of Restoration at Castle Howard and Brideshead Revisited' which also included the transformation of that part of the house after the great fire of 1940 from derelict rooms to film sets.

At 2pm we joined a tour focussing on the 1940 fire, which occurred when a chimney caught fire on the night of 9 November, sweeping through the south-east wing and destroying the Great Hall, the dome and nearly twenty rooms. This was during wartime when the house was occupied by a girls' school and our very enthusiastic guide gave an animated account of how the fire was discovered and how many valuable artworks were saved by the girls throwing them out of the windows.

After that we returned to complete our tour of the house and for some more refreshment, finally leaving when the property closed at 4.30pm, to walk back to Coneysthorpe. Since the book which had been produced about the Brideshead Revisited exhibition was no longer available, I bought a novel by Jan Hunter called My Two Lives, a time-travel story inspired by and set in Castle Howard. I'm also looking forward to replaying my Brideshead DVDs when we get home and seeing how the house and garden were used in the filming. Our hostess Gillian told us that some of the hunt scene was actually filmed on the Green outside our house at Coneysthorpe!