Emma Manners, the Duchess of Rutland, has opened up on her incredible life living at Belvoir Castle, near Grantham, - one of the stunning locations which features in Netflix's hit The Crown, with Season 5 out in November. The Regency Castle stands in for Windsor and has featured in all three series of the worldwide blockbuster charting the ups and downs of the British Royal Family.
The Castle was the stunning backdrop for Little Lord Fauntleroy, a 1980's film starring Sir Alec Guinness and Ricky Schroder, and one of the main locations for the 2000 movie, The Golden Bowl, starring Kate Beckinsale, James Fox and Uma Thurman.
Its breathtaking exterior was used in 2006 as the location stand-in for ‘Castle Gandolfo’, the Pope’s summer residence overlooking Lake Albano near Rome, where the sinister council meets in The Da Vinci Code.
READ MORE: Belvoir Castle through the modern ages in archive photos
The Duchess admits in an interview with Nottinghamshire Live she does not watch television or The Crown. "When the film crew come (for The Crown), you have thousands of people backing them up, and caterers and caravans, so the whole North Terrace of the castle is covered in caravans and goodness knows what," she says.
"Basically, I spend quite a lot of time hiding and letting them get on with their job. So, you know, they have got a job to do and I pretend I am part of the domestic team quite a lot of the time, so I can scurry around and get on with my running the estate".
Crowning a hill, the Castle’s turrets and towers rise over the Vale of Belvoir on a 10,000-acre estate. It's the ancestral home of the Duke of Rutland, where the family has lived in an unbroken line for almost a thousand years.
The name Belvoir – meaning ‘beautiful view’ in French, and pronounced today as ‘beaver’ – dates back to Norman times. On a clear day from the North Terrace, visitors can see as far as Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire.
The Duchess, now aged 59 and mother to five children aged between 19 and 29, finds living in a huge home means everything takes that little bit longer - like answering the door and putting out the bins. "It was a bit like living in a high-rise flat in a sense," she says. "Everything had to be carried everywhere, shopping, there's not a lift".
But she's certainly not complaining, "it was just the reality of heritage and in that you have got to make it adaptable for 21st Century life and the simple things are the things that people don't think about, you know, I think when the doorbell went it would be five minutes to answer the door".
The Duchess wasn't dreaming of living in a castle. She was thinking she would probably meet a farmer in Herefordshire and be a farmer's wife, so her life now "is unexpected and accidental".
"Accidental" being a nod to the title of her book, The Accidental Duchess, charting her life as a Duchess - from living on the set of The Crown, how she came to living in a vast castle with 365 rooms, to partying with celebrities Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant.
It's a glamourous life which could not be further from her upbringing as a pony-mad farm girl on the Welsh Borders who had never even heard of the Duke of Rutland and had no idea who he was when she first met him aged 27. She was running an interior decorating business in Herefordshire and went to an event called Decorate.
A dinner party followed and the Duke of Rutland happened to be there - she has devoted an entire podcast to how they met. Brushing shoulders with the rich and famous and Royalty followed.
She says: "I did meet Catherine Zeta-Jones many years ago when I first became a Duchess. Lots of famous people have been here filming, because, as I say, I try to keep my head down and out of the way.
"But Catherine was great, because she was a fellow Welsh girl, and it was lovely to meet her and she was filming a movie called The Haunting many years ago. Hugh Grant has been to stay and he is wonderful.
"He is quite scared of ghosts and the children were playing pranks on him, and I write about it in my book in detail. I think he came for a winter weekend in the castle".
Has she seen any ghosts? Her answer is "no", but some children have. "They (the ghosts) can be quite disgruntled employees from hundreds of hundreds of years ago - that is one that Violet (her daughter) had quite a lot to do with. When the children were little, they reported seeing ghosts at night but they don't anymore".
The Duchess jokes she is more likely to be found with a broomstick going round, or maybe a sword or a pistol, in the middle of the night if she saw anything.."like a guard dog". "I have those amazing cameras, so if there is any activity whatsoever, these cameras have these screens and we have 24-hour coverage".
She has a special relationship with Elizabeth Manners, the fifth Duchess of Rutland, who died from a burst appendix in 1825, having commissioned and overseen rebuilding after fire ripped through the castle in 1816. 'The Accidental Duchess' records how the fifth Duchess sent the current Duchess messages through one of the tour Guides.
"She is always on my shoulder, keeping an eye on me, looking out for me and kicking me on to do my job.," adds the Duchess. "There are portraits of her everywhere.
"It really is her castle, she commissioned and built this castle and it is the fourth castle on this site and so it was finished in Regency times and it is absolutely as she intended, so yes, she does have a really strong presence".
A typical day begins with the Duchess going for a quick run with her dogs. She reaches her office at 7.45am and then she works until 6pm, holding meetings and driving things forward. Recent additions have included an adventure playground, which opens on October 15, featuring a giant timber castle, along with a ship and towers, the Engine Yard shopping village, and Vale House boutique hotel in the grounds of the Engine Yard near the castle.
At the heart of her work is preserving the history and heritage. She has a podcast which seeks to recognise other women who lead stately homes today, sharing stories of a modern chatelaine, and what it takes to keep a stately home going today.
Read next:
'Great cast' set to bring fun twist with celebrity faces to Cinderella panto at New Theatre Royal
Lincoln-built WW1 tank cut up for scrap is reimagined as a working replica
Lincoln veteran's fond memories of year spent photographing royals
