Today’s custodians live in a modest house a few feet from Highclere’s back door, but stay in the castle frequently. It’s a big house, with around 300 rooms, but ‘you sleep well here, because there’s no TV and the Wi-Fi doesn’t really work’, says Lady Carnarvon. The place was quite tired when, in 2001, she took it on. During the Second World War it had been used to house evacuees, and so had escaped destruction by requisition, but the decoration left a lot to be desired. ‘Everything was either shiny cream, or shiny green,’ she says. In 2003 they had to replace the roof over the saloon – ‘a compulsory one, that,’ adds Lord Carnarvon. Almost 20 years later, having redecorated and replumbed, Highclere is thriving.
But this comes at a huge cost. The Duchess of Rutland once told me that running Belvoir Castle requires about £500,000 a year. Does it cost that much to run Highclere? ‘Double that,’ says Lady Carnarvon. ‘The main [thing] is the salaries. Every day I’m trying to bring in whatever money I can.’ The scale of the castle building – as well as the follies, which have ‘absolutely no income attached to them’, sighs Lord Carnarvon – means that everything costs 10 times what it ought.
Repairs to the glass peach house are costing £100,000 – for just half of it. ‘You think: I could have a deposit for a flat in London, or I could have a new peach house – great! But I’m entirely happy. I accept the responsibility,’ says Lady Carnarvon. She is the chief executive of Highclere, while her husband is chairman. She is dreading the electricity bill if, as predicted, prices rocket. ‘I’ve put LEDs in all the rooms I can.’
Lord Carnarvon’s Wikipedia entry describes him as ‘a British peer and arable farmer’. It seems rotten to be described primarily as something that one has no control over: being a hereditary peer. The day after the 5th Earl died in 1923, his son had a ‘sudden realisation that my name was no longer Porchester but Carnarvon… It dawned on me that my soldiering days must come to an end and with them a life of comparative freedom,’ he wrote in his memoirs.
In 2001, Lord Carnarvon endured the same transition. How did that feel? ‘It was the worry that suddenly the buck stops here, with me, and there’s no one else to talk to. People think that if they’re getting on with their parents, at least there will be [someone else there] if it’s something really difficult, but then suddenly that person isn’t there any more and it’s just me,’ he says. His mother, Jeanie, Countess of Carnarvon, died in 2019. ‘You’ve just got to make it happen somehow. It is quite a big worry.’
