Chatsworth House

Chatsworth is the rare great house that looks best from across a river. Its long south and west fronts rise above the River Derwent at the foot of wooded hills, and the parkland in front of them runs to the water as open, grazed grass dotted with trees, the effect Capability Brown created for the 4th Duke of Devonshire between 1755 and 1764. James Paine's bridge north of the house was set at an angle precisely to command the best view of the west front, and that view, across the river, is one of the set pieces of the English landscape.

The first house was begun in 1553 by Bess of Hardwick and her husband Sir William Cavendish, who died in 1557 before it was finished; Bess completed it in the 1560s, and in its Elizabethan form it served, on several occasions from 1570, as a prison for Mary, Queen of Scots. What stands now is largely the work of their descendant William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire, who rebuilt the house piece by piece from 1687 to 1707. William Talman and Thomas Archer gave it its Baroque fronts, and the south front holds the richly furnished suite of state rooms. The Painted Hall, completed in 1694, is covered with Louis Laguerre's scenes from the life of Julius Caesar. In the nineteenth century Jeffry Wyatville added the North Wing and nearly doubled the size of the house. The Cavendish family still live here; the estate is held by the Chatsworth House Trust, and a long restoration of the house ran from 2004 to 2018.

The gardens are a gallery of water. The Cascade, first built in 1696 and rebuilt a few years later, sends water tumbling down a long stairway of 24 stone steps, each slightly different, so that the sound changes as the water descends. Joseph Paxton, appointed head gardener in 1826 at the age of 23, built the Emperor Fountain in 1843, after Tsar Nicholas I let it be known that he might visit; its jet has been recorded at nearly 300 feet. Paxton's Great Conservatory, completed in 1841, was then the largest glasshouse in the world; it was demolished in 1920, and in 1962 a maze of more than 1,200 yews was planted on its site. Inside the house the collections are among the finest in private hands in Britain: Old Master paintings and drawings, neoclassical sculpture, furniture and a great library.

Getting there

Chatsworth lies in the Derbyshire Dales on the eastern side of the Peak District, about 6 km north-east of Bakewell and 15 km west of Chesterfield; the western edge of Sheffield is about 14 km away. East Midlands Airport (EMA) is about 48 km away. The nearest main-line railway station is Chesterfield, from which Stagecoach bus 170 runs to Chatsworth and on to Bakewell; bus 218 connects Sheffield and Bakewell via Chatsworth.