Castle Howard

Listen first. Gravel shifts under your shoes, and somewhere across the lawns a peacock calls. Ahead of you, honey-coloured stone rises in wings, columns and urns. Above it all sits a dome, pale against the Yorkshire sky. It looks like a palace that has wandered into the countryside. In a way, that is exactly what it is. Welcome to Castle Howard, in the Howardian Hills, a short drive north-east of York.

Despite the name, this is not a castle. There are no arrow slits and no drawbridge. An older castle once stood on this site, and it burned in the late seventeenth century. Charles Howard, the third Earl of Carlisle, decided to build something new in its place. He did not want a fortress. He wanted a statement of taste, wealth and power, written in stone for everyone to see.

Here is the first surprise. The man he chose to design it had never designed a building before. John Vanbrugh was a soldier and a successful playwright, known for witty comedies on the London stage. He had no formal training as an architect. Work began around 1700, and Vanbrugh approached the house the way a dramatist approaches a stage, with grand entrances, dramatic skylines and a sense of theatre.

Vanbrugh did not work alone. He relied on Nicholas Hawksmoor, a trained architect who had worked alongside Christopher Wren, the designer of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London. Hawksmoor brought the technical skill. Vanbrugh brought the bold imagination. Together they created a style called English Baroque. Baroque architecture loves movement, curves and drama, and you can see that in the way the facade steps forward and back as your eye travels along it.

Now look up at the dome. It crowns the centre of the house, and it is often described as the first dome built on a private home in England. Domes belonged to cathedrals and churches, not to houses. Putting one here was a confident, almost cheeky choice. The Earl was telling his visitors that his home deserved the same kind of grandeur as a place of worship.

Walk around to the side and something strange appears. The two wings of the house do not match. Building continued for more than a century, across the lives of several earls, and fashions changed. When the west wing was finally completed in the eighteenth century, it followed the calmer Palladian style instead. Palladian design copies the clean, balanced classical forms of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Many visitors never notice the difference until someone points it out.

Inside, the Great Hall is the heart of the house. It rises the full height of the building, right up into the dome. Light falls from above onto stone, plaster and painted surfaces. The Venetian painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini decorated this space in the early eighteenth century. Stand in the centre, tilt your head back, and you will feel the height pull your eyes upward, just as Vanbrugh intended.

But much of what you see overhead is not original. In November 1940, during the Second World War, a fire broke out in the house. The dome collapsed, and the Great Hall and several rooms were badly damaged. For years the house stood open to the sky at its centre. In the 1960s the family rebuilt the dome, and artists recreated the lost painting of Phaeton, a figure from Greek myth who drove the chariot of the sun and fell from the heavens.

That rebuilding carries a quiet irony. Phaeton's story is a tale of fire and falling, and it was painted on a dome that itself fell in flames. Today, part of the house still shows the scars of 1940. Some rooms were restored, and some were left as reminders. Castle Howard remains a family home, still connected to the Howard family more than three centuries after building began.

Many people recognise this place before they ever arrive. In 1981, the television series Brideshead Revisited was filmed here, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. Castle Howard played Brideshead, the grand family home at the centre of the story. It appeared again in the film version in 2008. More recently, a new generation saw it as a ducal home in the Netflix series Bridgerton.

Step outside again, because the house is only half the story. The grounds were designed as a landscape to walk through, with views opening one after another. On the south side, the Atlas Fountain shows the giant Atlas holding the globe on his shoulders, surrounded by figures and water. Further away, lakes, woods and monuments sit across the hills like pieces on a board.

Follow the path to the Temple of the Four Winds, one of Vanbrugh's last designs. It is a small domed building with a portico on each side, sitting on a rise above the valley. Beyond it stands the Mausoleum, designed by Hawksmoor, a great circle of columns where members of the family are buried. The eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole joked that it would tempt a person to be buried alive.

So take a moment where you are. Notice the colour of the stone, warm in sun and grey under cloud. Notice how the dome always seems to find you, whichever path you take. As you walk away, turn back once. A playwright with no training built this, as if he were setting a stage. And the play, it seems, is still running.