Chatsworth House

Listen first. Somewhere ahead, water is falling over stone, step after step, in a long, even rush. Under your feet, gravel shifts and crunches. Beyond the honey-coloured walls, sheep are calling from the open park. The River Derwent runs slowly through the valley floor. Before you think about dukes or dates, notice how quiet it is here, a few miles from Matlock in the Derbyshire Peak District. The house sits low in its green valley, and the hills rise up on every side.

This is Chatsworth, the home of the Cavendish family, the Dukes of Devonshire. The family has lived on this ground for more than four and a half centuries. That continuity is the first surprise for many visitors. Chatsworth is not a museum that someone abandoned. It is still a lived-in family house. The rooms you walk through have been used, changed, argued over and loved by one family across many generations.

The story begins in the sixteenth century with a remarkable woman, Bess of Hardwick. She married four times, and each marriage made her richer and more powerful. With her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, she began building a great Elizabethan house here in the 1550s. Very little of that first house survives above ground today. But Bess set the pattern for everything that followed: ambition, building, and a determination to leave a mark on this valley.

Bess's fourth husband was the Earl of Shrewsbury. Queen Elizabeth the First gave him a difficult and costly duty. He had to guard Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a prisoner in England for nearly two decades. Mary was held at Chatsworth on several occasions. Out in the gardens, near the river, there is a small raised stone enclosure known as Queen Mary's Bower. Tradition links it to the captive queen, and locals say she took the air there. Treat that link as a story rather than proven fact... but it is a good place to stand and imagine.

The house you see now is mostly the work of the first Duke of Devonshire, at the end of the seventeenth century. He rebuilt the old Elizabethan house piece by piece, one wing at a time, over roughly two decades. The result is in the Baroque style — a grand, theatrical European fashion of that age, full of movement, gold and painted drama. Look at the long, flat-topped facades and the rows of tall windows. Look too at the window frames on the south front. Gilding on the exterior catches the light on a sunny afternoon.

Inside, the Painted Hall shows this ambition most clearly. The walls and ceiling are covered with painted scenes from the life of Julius Caesar. They are the work of the French painter Louis Laguerre. Stand at the bottom of the great staircase and tilt your head back. The figures seem to lean out of the ceiling towards you. The effect is deliberate. Every visitor who entered this hall was meant to feel small, and to understand the power of the family who lived here.

Now back to that sound of water. The Cascade runs down the hill behind the house in a long staircase of stone steps. It was created at the end of the seventeenth century, and it still works by gravity alone. No pumps push the water. It flows down from reservoirs high on the moors above. Each step is set at a slightly different width and height. Walk alongside it and listen. The note of the falling water changes as you climb.

The gardens have one more water story, and it is a quietly funny one. In the 1840s the sixth Duke expected a visit from Tsar Nicholas the First of Russia. To impress him, the Duke ordered a fountain that would shoot higher than any fountain in the Tsar's own palaces. The Emperor Fountain was built on the long pond south of the house. A new lake was dug on the hill above to feed it, again by gravity. And the Tsar? He never came. The fountain still bears his title.

The man behind that fountain was Joseph Paxton, the sixth Duke's head gardener. Paxton started as a young gardener and became one of the great engineers of Victorian England. At Chatsworth he grew a giant water lily from South America, the Victoria lily, and he made it flower in a heated glasshouse. Its huge, ribbed leaves gave him ideas about structure. Those ideas helped shape his design for the Crystal Palace, the vast glass hall of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.

Paxton's own great glasshouse here, the Great Conservatory, no longer stands. It was demolished in the early twentieth century, when it became too costly to heat and maintain. But you can still find traces of his work all through the garden. Look out for the rock garden, built from massive gritstone boulders stacked to look like natural cliffs. And look for the Willow Tree, a fountain shaped like a tree. Its branches are copper, and it was built to surprise and soak unwary visitors. It still does.

The wider parkland also has a story. In the eighteenth century, the landscape designer Lancelot Brown, known as Capability Brown, reshaped this valley. He softened the formal gardens of the earlier age into rolling grass, clumps of trees and gentle curves of river. Brown's style was meant to look natural. In truth, almost every view here was planned. When the land seems to fall away perfectly towards the river and the old bridge, that is design, not accident.

Chatsworth has also had a life on screen. In the 2005 film of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the house played Pemberley, the grand estate of Mr Darcy. In the novel, Austen's heroine visits Derbyshire and tours a great house open to polite visitors. That detail is true to history. Country houses like this one were already letting curious travellers walk through their rooms in Austen's time. You are part of a very old tradition today.

Before you leave, find a spot on the grass where you can see the whole south front across the water. Watch how the stone changes colour as clouds pass — gold, then grey, then gold again. Listen once more for the Cascade, the sheep and the river. Many people have stood in this valley and looked at this house: a captive queen, a disappointed duke, a gardener with big ideas. Now it is your turn. Take your time... the view will still be here as you walk slowly away.