Chatsworth stands four kilometres north-east of Bakewell in the valley of the Derwent, and it is the most visited place in the Peak District by a wide margin. It has been the seat of the Cavendish family, Dukes of Devonshire, since the sixteenth century, and the present house is a late-seventeenth-century baroque palace that has been added to, remodelled and rehung continuously ever since.
There are effectively four separate visits here, and it is worth knowing which you are buying.
Around thirty of the state apartments and principal rooms are open — the Painted Hall with its Laguerre ceiling, the chapel, the state rooms, the Sculpture Gallery, the library and the great staircase. The art collection is one of the finest in private hands anywhere: Old Master drawings, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Reynolds, Lucian Freud, and a continuing programme of contemporary acquisition and installation that stops the house feeling embalmed.
Allow two hours minimum, more if you look properly.
A hundred and five acres, and the reason a good many people prefer it to the house. It contains four centuries of garden fashion laid over each other:
The Cascade, a stepped water staircase of 1696 that visitors walk beside and children walk down.
The Emperor Fountain, built by Joseph Paxton in 1843 and capable of throwing water higher than almost any gravity-fed fountain in the world.
The rock garden, an enormous Victorian arrangement of moved boulders.
The maze, on the site of Paxton’s Great Conservatory.
The kitchen garden, the arboretum, the trout stream and the ravine.
Paxton, who was head gardener here before he designed the Crystal Palace, shaped much of what you walk through.
A separate ticket, and the family day out: farm animals, milking demonstrations, and a very large adventure playground in the woods, which is among the best in England and from which children have to be physically removed.
The thing most visitors do not realise. Chatsworth Park is around a thousand acres of Capability Brown parkland along the Derwent, and it is open and free to walk in. Sheep and deer graze it, the river runs through it, there is a mill ruin and a bridge, and the house rises above it.
You can spend a whole day here without buying anything but a car park ticket. Walking in from Baslow, Calton Lees or Pilsley avoids even that.
It is one of the finest free walks in England and it is what local people use Chatsworth for.
Time: a full day for house, garden and farmyard; two hours for the park alone.
Booking: advisable in the school holidays and essential for the Christmas opening, when the house is dressed on a theme and is very busy indeed.
Season: the house and garden run to a season with a substantial Christmas programme; the park is open year-round.
Accessibility: the house has a lift to most floors and the garden has accessible routes, though it is on a slope. The park is grass and gravel.
Facilities: restaurants, cafés, a shop and the Chatsworth Farm Shop at Pilsley, which is the best food shop in the district and a destination in itself.
By bus: several services from Bakewell and Sheffield stop at the gates, which makes Chatsworth easy without a car.
By car: four kilometres north-east of Bakewell, with large car parks that still fill on summer weekends.
On foot: paths run from Bakewell along the Wye and over the estate, about seven kilometres.
Yes. The parkland is open and free to walk in; the house, garden and farmyard are ticketed and parking is charged.
A full day for house, garden and farmyard. Two hours if you are only walking in the park.
A stepped stone water staircase of 1696 in the garden, which people walk beside and children walk down.
Yes — several services stop at the gates.
Chatsworth is a baroque palace with a great art collection and a huge park; Haddon, three kilometres from Bakewell, is a medieval manor house that was never modernised. Do both.