Duke packs up his fond memories

Now, 250 years later, responsibility for one of the most beautiful parts of the country belongs to the 12th incumbent of the title and his family.

This week the Duke moves out of Beamsley Hall, near Skipton, to take up the ancestral home at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. The couple will be sorely missed having established a reputation for friendly, down-to-earth relationships with their local community. On the eve of his departure, the Duke talked to the Craven Herald about the challenges of running the Bolton Abbey Estate in the future.

"I don't think the majority of the public visiting the estate will notice a great deal of difference once we move to Chatsworth," said His Grace.

Since moving to Beamsley Hall with his wife, Amanda Heywood-Lonsdale, and their three children some 25 years ago, the Duke has overseen the development of the family's Yorkshire estate.

"We will use Bolton Hall and our daughter Celina Carter and her family will be moving into Beamsley Hall.

"If we were moving to another country or never coming back here that would be very sad but we are not leaving, we will still be here. We still intend to be here several times a year for a week at a time. We will still be around to talk to people.

"There is nothing planned for Bolton Abbey at the moment, but there will be things next year.

"We've just finished with the new building at the Strid car park and I'm immensely pleased with that.

"My mother will still be involved in the running of Chatsworth. We are developing some more holiday cottages in Derbyshire and my mother is involved in that.

"We will probably have a look at doing something like that at Bolton Abbey.

"Twenty years ago we had about six of them here and I'm not sure that was enough to really make it work.

"Since then a lot of those have been used to provide accommodation for estate workers and we've been lucky to be able to do that," he added.

"We are looking forward to the challenges of Chatsworth. We have lots of ideas for what we can do down there."

The Duke also praised the people who do the day-to-day work for the estate.

"We have very good people here. Ben Heyes is very competent. We act as a fresh pair of eyes or as a sounding board when people come up with ideas. I think because we're not here seven days a week we see things that other people might have missed or we can bring a fresh perspective to it."

The Bolton Abbey estate is still very much a working one, its 30,000 acres include farmland, the 12th century Bolton Priory, the ruined Clifford hunting lodge at Barden, woodland, fisheries and two hotels.

It is the hotels, the Devonshire Arms Country House Hotel in Bolton Abbey and the Devonshire Fell Hotel and Bistro at Burnsall, that feature prominently in the work which the Duke carries out while abroad on visits for one of his other occupations, as deputy-chairman of Sotheby's.

"Whenever I go to America, I try and set up a meeting with a few travel agents and talk to them about the hotels and the estate. I enjoy that aspect of things. The hotel is going from strength to strength. It is now being very highly regarded both nationally and internationally."

Once a coaching inn, the Devonshire Arms boasts the Michelin starred Burlington Restaurant and a world class wine cellar.

That reflects the increasingly important role of tourism which now provides the bulk of the work carried out on the Bolton Abbey Estate.

Visitors have been welcomed to the estate since it formed part of the Bolton Priory.

But it was the 6th Duke who made it a proper visitor destination when he gave permission to the Rector of Bolton Priory to open up the woods to the general public. Bolton Abbey now welcomes some 500,00 visitors a year.

The present Duke's father also opened up hundreds of acres for public access during the late 1960s and Chatsworth, the family home in Derbyshire, has been open to visitors almost since the day it was built.

No charge was made for visiting until 1908, and the proceeds from that went to local hospitals.

Since then, almost 18 million people have visited the house, which is now run by an independent charitable trust.

Tourism numbers are currently at their maximum limit for the Bolton Abbey estate according to the Duke.

"I think visitor numbers will probably remain the same here.

"There is no doubt that having people travel all over your land does present problems.

"Litter is our biggest problem here. You only have to look at the sides of the roads to see that some people have no respect for the countryside."

According to the Duke, the problem stems from people passing through the estate rather than those visiting.

"The people who come here to walk or to stay are very good. The cleaner a place is, the cleaner it will stay. People are more inclined to drop litter in a place where there already is litter," he added.

"Bolton Abbey is a pretty old fashioned type of visitor attraction. People come here and they walk. Three hundred years ago this would have been inhospitable moorland and woodland and people would never have thought about walking as a form of entertainment.

"I feel very much that we hold this land as an inheritance and the estate is able to take a long term view of how things should be done."

The future of agriculture and the current changes in the way farmers are paid to farm are both obvious concerns for the estate.

"If a farmer takes the new payment and does stop farming, as long as he keeps the walls up and the barns repaired, but removes his livestock from the land, the fields would become overgrown.

"I am not sure whether new people visiting the countryside would actually know or notice," he added. "We have fields on the estate which, when you look, are full of bracken. They would have once been fields of grazing because no-one would fence off bracken," he added.

The number of tenant farms where farming provided the main income had dropped by around a third in the years since the family moved to Bolton Abbey, said the Duke.

"I have always regarded that agriculture and the countryside are inextricably linked. Most of our tenant farmers now are college educated, they are pretty switched on. They don't need advice from us," he added.

The Duke said hill farming was a real concern and that it was difficult for farmers to see a particularly rosy future.

"But, they have been there before and they are a pretty determined group of people and they have been naturally optimistic," he said.

The Duke said one of the biggest changes he had seen over the years was the use of the internet to be able to promote the area.

"It is comparatively inexpensive for bed and breakfast owners to use. Before, how would you have gone about getting leaflets about Bolton Abbey in other parts of the country?"

"I don't think people realise how much hard work goes into running a B&B. It's often done by just one person and they are the front of house manager, the cook, the housekeeper and the bank manager."

There were also bright spots in agriculture, said the Duke, including both Stephen and Ann Crabtree at Storiths, who have created the Bolton Abbey Foods range of traditional meat cuts, and Chris and Sue Heseltine, who have opened up their 600-acre Hesketh Farm as a visitor attraction.

"I think what the Heseltines are doing is marvellous. I hope that we will be doing a lot more with them," he added.

The Duke said it would be interesting working with a different national park authority - Chatsworth and the Derbyshire Estates fall within the Peak District National Park.

"I think the planners do a difficult job because they are often having to say no but you only have to drive around in any national park to see what a wonderful job they do. They are tasked with taking a long term view and they do it very well," he added.

"Since we received planning permission to extend the Devonshire Arms 25 years ago we have probably been responsible for around 100 jobs in the hotel industry.

"We got the support of the National Park Authority for that extension and I would like to think that we have a very good relationship with them," he added.

"I think we're very lucky in that I don't think people realise how complex the whole thing is. But, people do appreciate what they see."