A delicious corner of England

I’VE NEVER met Deborah Cavendish, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, yet she has long been a hero of mine. Debo, as she is known to her friends, now a feisty 90, was the youngest Mitford sister.

Her recent autobiography Wait For Me! immediately conjures up images of a determined little girl desperately trying to keep up with her five sisters.

I recently took a couple of days off to visit her family home, Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Members of the Cavendish family have lived at Chatsworth since 1550. It’s a huge stately house in the midst of a 100-acre garden in the centre of the 1,000-acre Chatsworth Park, surrounded by the Peak District national park. It takes serious initiative, a ton of creativity and buckets of hard work to keep the roof on a stately home of this size.