by Lord Edward Manners drives his Land Rover up the hill into the medieval park at Haddon Hall. The view from the top is an absolute idyll.
Down in the valley is the River Wye, teeming with colorful wild trout, and then there’s Haddon, nestled alongside it.
We’re here to look at what it’s like to “unpark” the park – or perhaps de-farm it. The fences, the old dividing lines between spaces that used to be fields once 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 restoring parking.”
It’s a project Lord Edward is particularly passionate about, but it’s just one part of the 30-year restoration plan he set up in the late 1990s.
“We’re 20 years in now,” he says. “We know which pieces to achieve in the order, and most of it we can do through cash flow.”
This is helped by Haddon’s popular artisan markets, and bat-watching evenings in the 12th-century church – as well as the Peacock at Rowsley, a hotel bought by Lord Edward a few minutes down the road.
Open to the public from March to October, the house has 80 residential properties, two quarries, and 20 miles of riverbank on its 3,800 acres in a popular part of Derbyshire.
Being a proper family home Haddon desperately needs extra warmth.
In 2013, Lord Edward married entrepreneur Gabrielle Ross, and five years later they moved into Haddon with their two children, becoming the first family to live in the house full-time since the 17th century.
His wife’s first contact with Haddon left a lasting impression.
“Haddon has a masculine and a feminine side,” says Lady Edward. As you approach it at the driveway, it is big and strong with a protective wall – it is quite intimidating on its stone rock.
“But if you approach it from the other side, you see its romantic, beautiful side, shining where Bombay glass catches the light. I remember being overwhelmed by the beauty of it.”
On that first visit, she remembers Haddon was completely asleep. “All the furniture had dust covers on it. It felt like we were walking through a fairy tale castle that was not awake [for years].”
Haddon is not necessarily an easy house to live in. When they first moved in with their sons, the house was so “very cold,” says Lady Edward, that she wore a ski suit inside.
“But it’s a house you want to live in with a family,” she says – so they should stay. “He needs children, he needs love, he needs the energy.”
What is inescapable about the building is its extraordinary age.
“You think, ‘how can this be true – how can this last?’ It’s very old, and that gets to you, it gets to you.”
Medieval markings on the doors indicate “whether you were allowed to pass through the door [if you were part of the family]or you didn’t [as staff]. If you were illiterate, it was a code,” she says.
As the family settled in, “we are naturally going towards the rooms that the family would have used. It’s so amazing – it’s these steps of the past that you can’t hear, but you can still follow.”
Some rooms have a cathedral feel and smell, that woody, slightly musty but ancient sense that comes with buildings with cloisters and courtyards.
It is as different as Belvoir, that relative new construction, high on the hill, visible from miles around. As Lady Edward puts it, “Haddon is so old they didn’t take him for ego.”
Haddon has been in the Manners family for 461 years.
It was never sold, having passed through one line of descent – first, through the Vernon family who acquired the estate in 1170, and built the house, and then through the Manners, after the heiress Dorothy Vernon married Sir John Manners, second son of Thomas. Manners, 1st Earl of Rutland, who lived at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire in the 1560s.
Despite its long history within one of England’s oldest families, Haddon was not always at 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 up, not returning in any meaningful way until the early 20th century.
So, Haddon went into a deep sleep.
In the 1920s, Lord Edward’s grandfather John Manners, 9th Duke of Rutland, realized his long-held ambition to restore Haddon as a family home, modernize it with electricity and running water, install tennis courts, and finally move in with his family.
But then in 1940, he died at the age of 53, with his 21-year-old son Charles in charge.
During the war, both Haddon and Belvoir were used as storage by the Public Record Office – a move negotiated by John Rutland to prevent them from becoming barracks and thus trashed – and Haddon was otherwise excluded. .
During Lord Edward’s childhood his father Charles Rutland ran Belvoir and Haddon himself.
Former MP for West Derbyshire Matthew Parris remembered the Duke as a “remarkably ruthless chairman” of local Conservative Party meetings, who “conducted business with a brisk curtsey and a steely glance”.
Charles Rutland, says his son, was a proper gentleman, an admirable person, with great joy and charisma. He was very well-liked, and very easy to get along with.”
When Charles Rutland inherited the dukedom in 1940, he had two magnificent houses in Belvoir and Haddon, and other estates besides. His younger brother, Lord John Manners, had the right to use Haddon for life, but the system was imperfect.
“There was confusion between my father and uncle over Haddon, about the rights my uncle had here, what he would pay for, and what my father would pay for,” says Lord Edward.
“That arrangement was quite new at the time. It worked a lot but it would only take a bit or two of push back [to fall apart] and then there would be an all-powerful spouse.”
Charles Rutland decided that this would not happen to his sons if he could help it, and agreed that Belvoir and Haddon should be split.
Belvoir would extend through the main line and remain with the Duke of Rutland – since 1999, Lord Edward’s older brother David – and Haddon would become Lord Edward.
This is how it is now: Haddon is Lord Edward’s house, and it will not go back to the duke on his death, but instead will go to one of his own children.
In the church, where John Rutland found the 15th century wall paintings, I get the chills – how unusual they are today.
John Rutland remains an inspiration for Lady Edward. “When I look back at his work and the notes he wrote, I think about his passion and drive, and what he did in a very short period of time. It’s probably the driving force behind me here.”
