Why it’s dog days for Downton: Lockdown at the real Abbey has meant bank loans

The Countess of Carnarvon is fresh from her daily al fresco yoga session in Highclere’s sweeping gardens.

‘I’ve just been inverted!’ she cries, emerging pink-cheeked and ruffled from the bushes, clutching a yoga mat and surrounded by dogs.

She’s flustered, but it’s little surprise. This morning she’s already had to deal with a carpet restorer for one of the huge rugs from the library and is still reeling from burst pipes and knee-high floods in one of the estate cottages.

But most of all, she’s worried about the slowness of Boris’s ‘Road map to Recovery’ — not just for Highclere Castle (which has been home to generations of Carnarvons since 1679 and usually welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year, plus about 15,000 school children), but for Britain’s entire hospitality industry.

‘At the moment, this country is at war. We’re at 1940. We’ve somehow got to figure out how to make it through the next few months,’ she says.

‘I’m delighted that people are able to go to Halfords to buy a bike and pop into a shop and buy a card, but why can’t they go to a visitor attraction until May 17? It’s inconsistent!’

The Countess of Carnarvon (pictured) is fresh from her daily al fresco yoga session in Highclere’s sweeping gardens

Recently, she spoke out on the BBC Today programme — where host Martha Kearney seemed a teeny bit unsympathetic about the plight of someone living in a 300-room castle in Berkshire recognised the world over, thanks to Downton Abbey.

‘I’m not saying poor me. Absolutely not!’ she says firmly. ‘I’m talking about the whole industry — pubs in Cornwall, hotels on the south coast, historic attractions.

‘Like everybody, I live in a house — it’s just on a different scale.’

Just a bit. Everything about Highclere is vast. The entrance drive through 1,000 acres of parkland is more than a mile long. And the architecture is soaring and impossibly elaborate.

Inside, there are miles of plumbing pipes, and so many bedrooms everyone seems to have lost count, though they are thought to number between 60 and 80.

It goes without saying that the overheads are equally expansive, but income has been ravaged by Covid and, despite its grandeur, Highclere is very much a business, relying on paying visitors.

‘Last March, it was like falling off the white cliffs of Dover and hitting the pebbles rather hard before we had time to pull the parachute cord,’ says Lady Carnarvon.

Since the start of the pandemic they have been able to open for barely three months in total, and, even then, at less than 60 per cent of usual capacity.

So far, they’ve taken out two large loans to help plug the gap — ‘But there’s only so much money you can borrow. It’s going to take us 15 years to pay it back.’

They’ve also been forced to make a third of their core staff redundant, which upset Lady Carnarvon deeply. Not because she enjoys being waited on hand and foot. But because she adored them.

‘I cried,’ she says, almost brimming over again. ‘I did it. You have to. You can’t not.’

On top of all that, she and her husband, Geordie, the eighth Earl of Carnarvon, have had to ‘breathe in and sell stuff’.

What sort of ‘stuff’? Surely not the prized Van Dyck that hangs above the 20-seater table in the great dining room?

‘No no no!’ she looks appalled, and then patiently explains that all houses which are open to the public have to deal with HMRC rules that dictate they can’t sell anything which people might come to look at.

‘I can’t tell you what we sold, but it had to be something that doesn’t matter to the integrity of the heritage,’ she says.

'I've just been inverted!' she cries, emerging pink-cheeked and ruffled from the bushes, clutching a yoga mat and surrounded by dogs

‘I’ve just been inverted!’ she cries, emerging pink-cheeked and ruffled from the bushes, clutching a yoga mat and surrounded by dogs

From the outside, the castle looks closed and blank. Most of the hundreds of windows are shuttered, the front door is bolted shut and the lawns deserted.

Inside, it is quiet, surprisingly warm, but lifeless, despite Lady Carnarvon’s point-blank refusal to swathe anything in dust sheets. ‘We don’t want to cover ourselves in shrouds. It’s too dismal.’

So the library is still a sumptuousness of ruby-reds and polished wood, but it feels empty and flat, other than a quick cameo from the sole remaining housekeeper, Sheila (‘she’s a marvel’).

Like so many of Britain’s stately home-owners, the Carnarvons don’t actually live in the castle, but in a rather more prosaic house in the grounds, where usually after a very bad night’s sleep with the eighth Earl and their eight dogs, Lady Carnarvon wakes at 5.45am.

There’s no lady’s maid. No nice Mrs Patmore equivalent to knock up a spot of kedgeree.

‘I am chief cook, bottle-washer and dog walker,’ she says, ‘though, very occasionally, a cleaner might turn up.’

On the weekends, she and her husband tend to all the animals and muck out the horses.

‘We’ve got far too many,’ she says. ‘Particularly as we haven’t been riding because neither of us wants to have an accident and end up in hospital at the moment.’

There wouldn’t be any time, anyway. She sounds like a workaholic. While her husband runs the estate side of things and keeps out of the limelight, the Countess is the face of Highclere — usually at her desk 12 hours a day.

She writes endless books about the castle, pens her blog, hosts virtual Q&As and cocktail parties and, in non-Covid times, travels the world giving lectures, capitalising on the huge boost Downton gave to Highclere — a fourfold increase in visitor numbers.

‘I can’t imagine flopping about on a sofa!’ she says in horror when I ask if she ever puts her feet up à la Lady Grantham, tinkling a bell to have her every need met.

Even when filming was taking place — from February to June for each of the six series of Downton and an additional one-off two months for the film — she was flat out. Constantly in the wings, showing crew how to move furniture — ‘you take a girl in your arms and a chair by its bottom’ — and reminding people to wipe their feet and respect the carpets.

A sequel to the Downton Abbey film is expected to start filming in the summer, and, despite all the palaver, Lady Carnarvon is thrilled. ‘We all got very used to each other. We had a good routine. It was like a new term at school — ‘here they come!’.’

After all, a house like this is used to being busy, to being full of life. ‘It comes alive with people and without them things go wrong.’

Pipes burst — ‘almost always at six o’clock on a Friday!’ Windows blow in. Woodwork rots. The roof needs constant monitoring. Oh . . . and the resident ghosts start stretching their legs too.

Just the other day, in one of the rooms in the deserted castle, she heard footsteps on the landing outside. ‘Compared with all the other challenges at the moment, it feels quite minor!

‘I worry all the time. I’m trying to plan for today, five weeks, five months. But beyond that, it’s all a bit scary,’ she says.

Of course, Lady Carnarvon, or Fiona Aitken as she grew up, could have led a very different life, free from the pressures of this 6,000-acre estate.

The eldest of six sisters from a wealthy family in Fulham, West London, she studied English and German at the university of St Andrews and had trained as an accountant when she bonded over a mutual love of World War II poetry with newly divorced Geordie — the future Earl and godson to the Queen — at a dinner party.

Was the castle a consideration? ‘I just married a really lovely man,’ she says. ‘My father-in-law was not that old and his father had lived until he was 90, so I really didn’t think about living here, which is probably a good thing!’

Geordie inherited the castle in 2001, and that was that.

It is, of course, a magical place — a romantic fairy-tale castle. But it also dictates their entire life.

Not just that, but all that careful stewarding and the endless books won’t even benefit her and Geordie’s son, Edward, now 21, because the entire estate will pass to George — Geordie’s son and heir from his first marriage.

Does she ever yearn to live somewhere normal?

‘Quite often! Sometimes I’d really, really like to be living in a cottage by the sea in Cornwall,’ she says. ‘But Geordie and I are committed. With privilege comes responsibility.

‘Highclere is part of Britain’s heritage and we need to protect it. I am not complaining. I am not woe is me. We are just one of thousands of businesses ,and all we want is to get back to work, slowly and carefully, to turn the propellers of this great ship, help the country recover and not have to go for any more bloody walks!’