￡80k to heat, ￡280k for the drive – why a stately pile can be a nightmare inheritance
Upon hearing the news, in February 1916, that his brother John, Viscount Weymouth, had been killed in France, and that he was now the heir to Longleat House in Wiltshire, 11-year-old Lord Henry Thynne went down to the front steps, looked up at the house, and said to himself: “I will never be able to look after you.”
How wrong he was. After the Second World War, he became the sixth Marquess of Bath. In 1949, looking for a way to make Longleat pay, he opened the house to the public, and then, in 1966, opened a safari park on the estate, which set it on a path to financial security. His inheritance put Longleat and his family on the map; today, the estate attracts 800,000 visitors a year. In 2020, his grandson Ceawlin Bath was said to be worth ￡215 million; two years earlier, Longleat Enterprises’ profits were ￡3.5 million.
A century on and many heirs to estates still feel a healthy sense of trepidation about their inheritances, coming as they often do with a very big house in the country. Last week, it was reported that Lord Max Percy, younger son of Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland, had put his 9,486-acre Rothbury estate up for sale. Younger sons, recently given a bad press by the Duke of Sussex, are famously the better-off siblings.
Able to dodge the burden of carrying on the family name, they can nevertheless enjoy the spoils of their family wealth. The marketing of Rothbury, which is not part of the core ducal estate, seems to be a case in point. Land values in England, after all, increased by an average of 36 per cent between 2011 and 2021, according to a market review published last year, and the sale of Rothbury could turn out to be a canny business move. What we might never know is if his older brother, George, Earl Percy, who is due to inherit the title and the ducal estate, dreams of doing the same but feels unable to do so. For, unlike his sibling, his hands are tied by duty and expectation.
Charles Courtenay, 19th Earl of Devon, 47, inherited Powderham Castle near Exeter in 2015, 18 months after he returned from living in Los Angeles where he married his wife Allison Joy “AJ” Langer in 2004. However, what they hoped might be a gentle change of the guard turned out to be rather abrupt. Within two months of moving to Powderham, Lord Devon’s father Hugh Courtenay, 18th Earl of Devon, died aged 73. Ultimately, his son was prepared for his inheritance. “The fact of me taking on that responsibility was expected – I’d had time to discuss things and get myself in situ.” He had known since childhood that he was likely to inherit Powderham and its 3,500-acre estate: “It was never set in stone but my father was quite traditional in how he viewed things.”
In common with the vast majority of aristocratic families, the Devon title and estate has passed via male primogeniture – in which the eldest male, be he son, nephew, or cousin, inherits – for the last 28 generations. Though many young heirs are the direct beneficiaries of primogeniture, there is an increased sense of frustration with the system; one millennial peer tells me that if he has no sons, his estate will be left to his daughter and split from the title for the first time in 500 years.
“Families aren’t necessarily as wedded to the idea of primogeniture as they once were,” says Emily O’Donnell, senior associate in law firm Birkett’s private client adviser team. It comes as a surprise to few that they will inherit, and fewer still are willing to give up the opportunity. “It is rare for people to say, ‘We just don’t want this’,” adds O’Donnell. “These families see their inheritances as something that they can enjoy, and not necessarily as a burden.”
Many heirs are groomed from childhood for their destiny, invited to attend trustees’ meetings in their teens, and made directors after graduation. There is merit in having decided to take on those responsibilities, says Lord Devon. “I chose to be at Powderham – it wasn’t for lack of alternative options. It’s not difficult like other people’s lives are difficult, but it is challenging, and you need the ability to choose and be proactive in doing that, and not just feel like you have to.”
Responsibilities for those inheriting vary, but can include managing farming, sporting – shooting and fishing – and forestry businesses; operating as landlord to sometimes hundreds of tenants; managing and maintaining the main property, often a large country house or stately home as a family home, a visitor attraction, or a wedding venue, or a combination of the three; and the upkeep, conservation, budgeting, and future-planning of all of these separate busy-making enterprises.
As estates have diversified, and opened farm shops, glamping-sites, safari parks, and so much more, landowners – and their wives – necessarily become a jack-of-all trades, able to bounce between showing distinguished visitors around one moment to fishing a dead pigeon out of the gutter in another.
Despite some of the less appealing aspects of this, taking an estate on can be tremendously exciting, says 34-year-old William Murray, Viscount Stormont, who has recently inherited his father Mungo Murray, 9th Earl of Mansfield’s Scone Palace in Perthshire. “With a real estate business like ours, with tourism and hospitality, the house is the core, but otherwise you can take it in whatever direction you want. The world is your oyster. You have to be sensible about budget, but a lot of people take their passion home with them and find a way to live it out.”
Lord Stormont and his wife are yet to move from London to Scone full-time. “It’s a watching brief,” he says. “My wife is very supportive of whatever I need to do.”
These days, few heirs truly inherit a hospital pass, though in the years following the Second World War, plenty did – their houses rotten after neglect and damage from wartime requisition. Many sold up, or were reduced to living in a wing – after all, the world had changed, and there seemed to be no reasonable prospect of ever fully occupying the big house again. Now, many of those inheriting can take advantage of the work their parents have done – installing new kitchens close to, rather than two miles from, the dining room, redecorating, and often rewiring.
But there remains a financial burden. “There is always something falling down – the bills keep coming,” says Lord Stormont, who has recently had some quotes submitted for the development of the stables at Scone: “Horrific,” he says, “millions. Just terrifying sums.”
Some jobs can be scheduled – planned roof maintenance, restoration of estate buildings, or redecoration – but others come at you fast. After Storm Arwen hit in 2021, the Duke of Northumberland was faced with ordering millions of young trees when whole plantations were wiped out in a night. In 2018, the Duchess of Rutland told me how Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire demands ￡500,000 a year “just to keep the castle going”, while at Highclere Castle, home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, it’s double that.
In 2010, three years after he inherited the neglected, under-invested Dunvegan Castle on Skye, Hugh Macleod embarked on a ￡1.2 million project to reline the roof in lead and make it “Skye-proof”. To fund the work, he remortgaged his London property, and took on debt. Regular bills too can be punitive; a Scottish landowner tells of spending ￡80,000 a year on heating oil before he installed “the inevitable, essential wood chip boiler” which is fed with wood from the estate at a cost of about ￡12,000 a year – “a virtual bill rather than a real one.”
Others describe bills for ￡100,000 for “a roof on one room, right in the middle of lockdown”; quotes for ￡280,000 to re-tarmac the drive; and, says one peer, a three-part restoration project that cost almost ￡10 million and necessitated a 20-year bank loan.
Though many families are on paper extremely rich – in 2023’s Sunday Times Rich List there were 15 aristocratic families with a combined wealth of almost ￡30 billion – many estates, aristocratic or not, only “wash their face”, or break even. As one heir puts it: “If you took the house out of it, we would be profitable in a good year, but with things such as walled gardens and historic buildings to restore and be repaired, there’s always uses for any profits you might make.”
Alongside financial worries come a renewed, inbuilt sense of not wanting to sell and let the side down – particularly if the estate has been in the family for centuries. As a younger son once put it to me: “It’s a weird sense of belonging when the ghosts in the house are your ancestors. You can almost picture all the previous generations sitting around a table, and you want them to nod their approval.” And as the wife of another says: “You’d constantly feel guilt if you sold – you couldn’t live with yourself.” The result of the perceived guilt is that many families suffer for their homes, rather than setting themselves free for a glamorous architect-designed new build in the Surrey hills.
To that point, very few have sold up in recent years. In 1963, the historian FML Thompson showed how 13 ducal seats were “all lived in by the descendants of their 19th-century owners”. Today, all but one of those 13 are still owned by a duke; the other has been sold, but the estate retained. In 2009, Michael Pearson, 4th Viscount Cowdray put Cowdray Park in West Sussex on the market, citing fears that it would leave his son with a noose around his neck. The house didn’t sell, and is let as an exclusive-use venue. A decade later, James Ramsay, 17th Earl of Dalhousie put Brechin Castle in Angus up for sale, which sits on land owned by his family since the 12th century, citing financial factors. Another landowner who currently has an estate on the market says he ought to have sold up years ago, but kept hanging on. Finally, he decided to cash in: “Let’s have some money in the bank for the first time.”
Others find the decision to give up their houses rather less appealing. In the 1980s, Richard Bridgeman, 7th Earl of Bradford, found himself in an invidious position. After his father died in 1981, he was left with ￡8 million in death duties, and a stately home on the Shropshire-Staffordshire border, Weston Park, which was losing money. “When father died, all the advisers said get rid of Weston, it’s been a millstone around your father’s neck – don’t let it be a millstone around yours,” he remembers. “But I thought what an amazing opportunity it was.” A restaurateur, he turned the house into a commercial events venue, and within three years, it was making a profit. But the Exchequer was calling, and in 1986 Weston was given to the nation. Having fought for five years to save his childhood home, Lord Bradford was faced with the choice “to keep Weston and lose the estate, or keep the estate and lose Weston.” He chose the estate, which is now run by his son Alexander, Viscount Newport, and Weston by the Weston Park Foundation.
Almost 40 years on, Lord Bradford, 75, still feels sad about losing Weston. “Yes, I do regret it,” he says. “Weston was built by my ancestor in 1671. I’m just sorry that things worked out the way that they did.”
For those who embrace their inheritance, the key is to find a balance between the responsibility and enjoying life. “It’s a fair exchange between what is often quite burdensome, and being able to live in an extraordinary way,” says Hugh Crossley, 4th Baron Somerleyton, 51, who took over Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk in 2006, before his father’s death in 2012. “It’s always good to be asking yourself whether that exchange rate of a privileged lifestyle against a really challenging one is paying a dividend.”
He wasn’t fazed about inheriting Somerleyton. “It was so institutionally normal that there was no other path – it wasn’t a chalice, it wasn’t a burden, it was just what happened,” he says. “I felt that it was my responsibility, and I was happy to get my teeth into it.” He adds that he can’t think of anyone who wasn’t prepared for their inheritance, “expecting it, and in a sense groomed.”
For Lord Stormont, if there’s a pair of golden handcuffs around his inheritance, the stronger part of these is the gold. Scone, he says, “is so part of my DNA” and running it is “complete chaos but immense fun. Every day is a new and fun day.”