The Ultimate Downstairs Tour Inside Our 500-Year-Old Manor

Hi everybody and welcome back to our YouTube channel and today we are going to give you drumroll the ultimate manor house tour and this is not just history is it? The point of this tour is not simply to give you all the dry facts but actually to talk a little bit about how we live here at Mapperton because that is much more fun. And also it's a it's a question that so many of you ask because we're open to the public eight months out of the year so we have four tours a and that's a lot of people getting through the house and people are like where do you guys live do you use that house um is it just sort of like you know sectioned off just for the public no we actually use these rooms and we're gonna give you some fun stories um on some i don't know some experiences that we've had in the rooms. Anyway here we are standing outside the front of the house now this is Mapperton house it was built originally in the 1540s and some people think my family has been here since then that is not true my grandfather sold a much larger house in Cambridgeshire outside Huntingdon called Hinchingbrook and moved here in the mid 50s he downsized if you can believe it and and of course he chose somewhere that is just astonishingly beautiful the setting of Mapperton is the thing but the house itself so this is we call it a Tudor Jacobean house but it's also got some Georgian bits as well it's a mix of all the centuries and architectural styles and a little bit let's just remember that what connects the house there's a bit of there's a Victorian wing there's actually a Victorian ring here it's not very big but we're standing here in in front of the Jacobean front now this wasn't originally the front of the house it was on the other side um and uh the Richard Broderick was now there were four Richard Brodericks if you can believe it and there he's his coat of arms up above and it and we should say that it passed through um the same family but through the female line several times since basically the 15th century so there was a medieval core here and that was the Brett family and then through marriage um one of the the granddaughters married Morgan and then the Morgans built the house that you the Tudor house that you see today and then again through the female line you get all these Richard Brodericks and they again built as Luke just mentioned the Jacobean so Bretts sometimes known as Brits yep Morgans Brodericks all four Richards and Comptons who built the Victorian wing that's exactly right so they all what's so cool is each generation added I mean obviously generation each century each century sorry each family added something and that's what's so extraordinary but it went down through the female line until 1919 and that was when it was bought by the widow of a wealthy Dutch banker her name was Ethel Labouchere she laid out the garden as well anyway I think we've probably talked enough about the outside let's get in now what's interesting is not only did Ethel Labouchere who Luke mentioned um bought the house in 1919 create the wonderful gardens between 1920-1927 but as soon as you walk into the house she was like oh I'm gonna put my coat of arms right here because she then uh did a wonderful through the dining room the entrance hall and the hall here fantastic arts and crafts ceiling but she put her coat of arms and this always got to me in red you can see it says I dread God I dread God but then underneath for those classical scholars it says and that means with swift but equal steps so she dreads God but with swift but equal steps most people see the finished videos on our YouTube channel but what you don't always see is everything happening behind the scenes whether we're filming in the house or the gardens or out in the wildlands we're constantly charging our cameras our batteries our microphones our phones our laptops and today we're filming in several different locations across the estate so of course I've brought the Jackery Explorer 2000 v2 along with us so here in the manor we're charging camera batteries ready for the next part of the shoot then we're out in the gardens filming content and it's so useful you guys having power exactly where we're working rather than constantly having to run back to the house and of course once we head into the wildlands there aren't exactly any convenient plug sockets so having portable power with us means we can keep cameras phones and all of our equipment charged while we're out and about filming and if you've watched our channel for a while you'll know I spend quite a bit of time at our 18th century pool whether I'm filming a cold swim taking photographs or working outdoors it is so useful having somewhere to charge everything between shoots so from the manor to the gardens to the wildlands and of course even the pool it's become a really practical part of our filming setup here at Mapperton thank you to Jackery for partnering with us on today's video she has the smartest coat of arms here and she's also got the only coat of arms with a stalk which is quite exciting because we may have stalks coming to Mapperton there's a lot of bird statuary in the gardens and this is entirely fake because most people would come in here and think that looks like a Tudor ceiling but it's not it's 1920s arts and crafts as as Julie said and that is because where we're standing is where the great hall came this was partitioned in order to create this smaller entrance hall and indeed the dining room on this side anyway this is where when people come to and we have a drinks party everybody throws their coats on this well sometimes we do have when we remember that's true if we remember we'll have a we'll have a coat hanger over here and there's a little bit of milling about that goes on in here but then we're sort of swiftly now we're going to go that way or this way oh here there's a tour actually going on right now so i think we'll go this way so this is one of the rooms that the public sees there's two rooms we just entered into that one from the entrance hall and then this leads into really wait wait wait show people oh okay because they don't normally get to see this do this um oh yeah yeah i know this door original door this would this was an original outside door and of course now it is incredibly grand because it leads to the lavatories that's right so when we have dinner parties in the didn't in the dining room these are the loos that people use and i think it's quite amazing because we actually have two loos down here i think they're rather smart and of course down here this was where the servant side of the house was so this door would have been closed you have the butler's pantry on this side and everybody else would have been at the back of the house now interesting question where do we live today we live in the servants quarters at the back of the house most of the time sometimes we'll come forward but mostly and up here you've got the fantastic old bell system so if i pull the doorbell one of those stars is going to start shaking from side to side and i remember in the time of my grandfather when he used to have a butler here if we all got in terrible trouble as children if we were in our bedrooms and we pressed the bell button because he'd have to come upstairs and go down again and we would just be laughing but um but anyway no no butler today sweetie but i'll come if you press the bell i just i'll come and bring you up but i love the one that says own a bedroom who's that your grandfather or mrs la bouchere my grandfather wow yeah that is extraordinary it just has here it has lord hinchingbrook's room that's your grandfather kitchen passage lower toilets main entrance chapel bedroom chapel dressing room attic dining room cellar main passage first floor bathroom chapel attic dining room cellar pretty cool that again these are just lovely pieces and they've probably been sitting there ever since your grandfather lived here right now back into the dining room where i am discovering lots of new things because are you the last time i came in here there were different pictures on the wall julie has done a reshuffle we don't know who he is by the way we don't know who he is no so why is he hanging on the wall if we don't know because this one came from hinchingbrook i went there to bring back some of the pictures that were still on loan so we still have a really good relationship with hinchingbrook house the original family ancestral seat it's now a school and your father had loaned some of the pictures looks like i brought them back pompous judge don't you think i don't or something like that so i just would not want to be in his thoughts out there sleuths out there i don't work out who this guy is this chap over here i i do recognize that's because he's your great great great grandfather so this is george's grandfather and his name is john john this is another john there are many many johns in the seventh earl in the montague family so this is john seventh earl of sandwich my father was john 11th earl of sandwich yeah and there was of course the fourth earl who was also john and his son i think was also a john so um there have been many johns anyway he's a fine looking joe he looks rather kind of louche this is where we have had over the years lots of fantastic family meals so christmas we've got two more leaves for the table so this table expands and it means that you can insert extra parts so you can you can fit more people these aren't the original dining chairs and the truth is i'm not so sure about them we got them quite recently on loan and then for one reason or another they ended up staying here yes you remember but there are 15 of them or 16 of them which means we can fit that many around the table whereas before we only had about eight or seven and a half and the reason if you're wondering why the reason that table is set it's just because we do house tours here as i mentioned outside and the house guides really like coming in here and showing people that the table set now i know that this is not exactly right but i just sort of piled it on well maybe people can spot the ralph loren tableware that's right because a little americana in here there is this is an american table setting except of course for these heavy lead goblets that actually you could do your weights with these they're so heavy can you everything else is mine everything else is yours now i was just saying that we extend the table out it might be quite fun to show people it's a georgian dining table and it came with this fantastic middle leaf um but of course sometimes we need to go even further and that isn't enough so guess what one day the wonderful raymond who's been here forever pulled out a piece of chipboard and turned it in to our third leaf so if we're really struggling we'll put that out the truth is we'll normally put a tablecloth so nobody can tell and we and we keep meaning to get another leaf made julie it's one of those things always on the list for three years no no five years okay five years it's on the list it just never gets done like so many things now once upon a time there was a clear theme to this room and it was a navel theme and everything and it was navel and then my dear wife brought all these things back from hinching broke and you scuppered it which is a navel term of course but interestingly if we come over here these um these tell the story of a very important battle in british history which is between um a ship called the lion and a ship called the elizabeth the lion was the british ship and the elizabeth was the french ship and that french ship was carrying bonnie prince charlie from france to scotland for the jacobite rebellion and um unfortunately we didn't manage to stop him so uh it was a failure but it's rather wonderful the way this portrays the different moments in that battle and then moving on over here this is thought to be a model of a ship called the royal james and the royal james was the flagship that my ancestor the first son of sandwich commanded he was admiral he was one of the admirals of the fleet and this was the ship that he went down in famously in the battle of sole bay what they would do was produce these models in order to test the designs before they actually built the ships themselves and even though this obviously has lost its mast and its spars and its rigging and all those things it's still got some wonderful decorative carving with gilt on it at the front here and is a really important ship model from that period of course britain was at the height of its naval powers and this was this was part of the reason that we were able to produce these incredible designs so pretty much actually moving on to the next room i mean it is still navy the seventh girl was in the navy first girl it's just this chop that we just don't know so of course my memory of this room as a child was coming here in the 70s and 80s when my grandfather was still alive and he would sit there the the table would sometimes not even have this middle leaf so it'd be quite small everything was laid immaculately he had a full silver service out he had three different glasses and he would come down in black tie every evening for dinner served by his butler on his own so that was the world in which he lived in yeah i mean i do wear black tie occasionally but i don't think you'd be very happy if i got up and dressed every night but you would you would sit here julie you could be there and i could be there so here's my story i don't know if you're going to remember this oh sorry i don't know if you remember this but when we were just married or was one of my first times um coming down here and celebrating christmas and i wore a hat in this room you wore hats to lunch to christmas lunch because it was so cold and hear me out your mother said to me you must take your hat off for christmas lunch so i said to your mother well i'm really cold is there any way you could turn up the heat and she said no you can keep the hat on then and that was it and for the rest of our christmases in here she never said you had to take your head up and i never asked her to turn the heat up that is that is rather brilliant and um of course we have christmas lunches we have easter lunches we have dinners and dinner parties and we have our grand historic tours in this room where we have those fabulous meals with invited guests um who come and stay with us for five days so this is a room that that gets used a lot it's got a lot of history it's got a lot of memories for us and um and i also remember as a child coming here and we used to have not these electric things here but they had they had little um paraffin heaters underneath and i used to play with the and um and probably set the place on fire or nearly did a couple of times right um anyway this this is the dining room i really i really like this and um usually i was looking up to see in the chandelier if there are any sort of remnants from our party party poppers from christmas that there's not sadly usually there's something you know and again we have a we have a fake tudor ceiling again arts and crafts from the 1920s put in by ethyl lavish and the oak paneling that you see here was put in by rod uh richard broderick ii so he did all the wonderful oak paneling okay let's move on to the room that we probably use the most so this is the room don't you think luke that we use the most not set up like this because it is set up for tours we should have a we should do a dinner and we should definitely do a dinner in here because this is an oak refectory table and it is not normally here this is normally set up with sofas yes and comfortable things to put things on and of course we are standing in the hall sometimes known as the great hall here at mapperton and once again it has a fake tudor ceiling um though this time one of my favorite stories about this room is of course that there are these extraordinary beams that cut across so you look up at this and you assume there's some very grand oak covered with plaster but of course that's not true at all because in the 1920s they had invented the rolled steel joist or girder so these are actually covering up steel girders which which we are really grateful to ethyl lavish therefore because it means the house probably won't fall down anytime soon the whole house was rebuilt with those but this room has so many interesting things carmwellian chairs date back to definitely the first year oh yes these are these are from hinchingbrook and this one over here another repair has still got some hay in it because that's what you use to stuff these chairs this is 17th century hay can you believe it i can put a bit my mate don't do that why would you do that oh my god so what is that i want to pick out first and foremost um the chair so this is the dutch burgermeister chair and this is the chair that supposedly king charles ii sat in when luke just talked about edward montague your forebearer who became the first earl of sandwich um he was given it was over there i keep looking for him and he's gone he's there oh he's there he's there he doesn't know this you know i'm gonna surprise you okay you're okay so everybody this is the chair it's fantastic it's you know lovely carving etc etc but the chair pad had well it had tapestry on it hear me out and it was in kind of not bad it was in a bad way so when emma telford who uh restored the peacock tapestry came here a couple months to deliver the peacock tapestry for me i showed her this and she said okay let me take it back to my workshop and i'll see what i can do so she's taking it back and guess what you're not going to believe this we've got a decision to make this is the tapestry the embroider here is cut from the tapestries here and pieced amazing together amazing so it's certainly not the original textiles that weren't there we've got to decide if we just want to recover it take off those comment down below if what you think we should do there's like it's in five different sections and then maybe put it on the other tapestries which are now there's six of them underneath the bed eventually i hope they get you know restored like the peacock tapestry and then we recover it ourselves wow wow that is exciting i mean we could always you know just um stick some rather fancy modern fabric on it no i think we could get some silk damask on it you could get some silk damask and put it on that we need to discuss now next to the chair here and this of course is a very important chair as julie says um and there is some uncertainty about the stories by the way i've always noticed that somebody some painter must have been painting the ceiling somewhere and spilled a chunk of paint or something i don't know if it's paint i think it's almost as if it's because why wouldn't it have gone into the crevices it's definitely paint anyway um moving on from the chair one of the favorite my favorite things in this room is the nib grandfather clock look at this thing can you believe that this was built 300 years ago and it still tells the time beautifully and i'm going to do a test now this this was not staged i am going to look at my fancy apple watch and see what the time is on it and whether because i i wound this about three weeks ago right okay my watch is showing yeah three thirty three three two no it's coming up to three and that is showing three thirty two so maybe it's lost about a minute in all of that time which is astonishing in order you know in order to wind this we have we have we have to take the top off what yeah honey here give me i never knew this by the way i had no idea i never this out i've never i never knew that this happened yeah you just would go wind the clocks and actually your dad did it for a real this is quite a big deal so and then in here you can see his name you've got the weights and you can see that they're coming to the end they're all the way down look at this nib so what i've got to do they they were the nib brothers there were three of them in oxford and this was this was john nib and they made these astonished they made other clocks as well they made the clocks for oxford colleges they made watches and um and by doing this we lift the weights and of course this would have been at hinchingbrook as well with the first at the time of the first jola sandwich yes and then yeah and then there we go so johannes nib um so made and what's really interesting that i just spotted this is that do you know this it's been screwed to the paneling to keep it there to keep it there so it doesn't yeah look at look at i didn't know that either yeah that's very that's very sensitive that's in case sort of riotous people sort of bump into the poor grandfather clock on the way over okay anyway so know that that's how you did it so there we go um and it's got a lovely chime as well as some of you will know other things in here my father always used to go on about this this um renaissance table um and he would always say well it's got nothing to do with our family at all but it's just rather beautiful i i love this story please don't draw attention okay so this is paulina this is the ugliest portrait in the house this this picture deserves to be buried at the end of the garden no i'm sorry to paulina because she may have been a fine gentle lady she's a mother and someone some of the lace is reasonably exquisite but but look at her face okay he just wasn't good at faces that's all so here we go here's the story i got an email from um a chap who lives in devon which is obviously the neighboring county to dorset and he said i'm um a widow and my wife was part of the peeps family and she has this portrait and she paulina peeps is the mother to edward montague and i thought this would be a nice place to house her so i said sure i'll head down and he was in his 80s so i brought him some maplerton kube went to um his house and we sat outside we had he gave me a tour of of his you know lovely um little house not little but i mean like lovely house and then we somehow ended up getting this into the car but what's really fascinating i just want to point out and when i brought them back i didn't tell anybody by the way i didn't tell him nobody knew i went it's like what i did in the dining room i just sort of hang pictures so and i have to say all the house guides really really like her and the story around her which is really quite sad is this so she was married to sydney montague who was the father of edward montague the first who eventually became the first girl a sandwich but did you know that edward was not the first born son so they moved to hinchingbrook in 1627 and edward was born in 1625 but his younger brother had died um drowning sorry his older brother edward's older brother died um in a moat that's right in the previous house that they were in his house that they were in and she of course looks she's probably like a holding her bible and and the lace work and look at there's no i listen i agree you come in closer and you can see that there's actually see that four yeah and and and look at the lace down there as well but but but in the round we should we should turn it around the other way well over here just to talk about family stories um we've got a wonderful photograph of my grandmother who um looks like a society dame there doesn't she and of course this was a grand ball at hinchingbrook um and she would have hated it because she looked like she she no no she would have though because she was a bohemian she had no interest in aristocratic life at all all she wanted to do was go and paint and hang out with the trendy people of the time like aubach and all those cool people this was the um this was the night that she lost the family jewels yeah so so the night of the grand ball at hinchingbrook she was wearing she lost so whatever she's wearing now you can see necklace and rings and all sorts of things they were all lost and years afterwards she used to go to a clairvoyant to try and help her remember where they were okay over here we have the first earl of sandwich in an important portrait by lily and i always think that he's not quite framed you know a bit of me wants to kind of move the frame over here and sort of put it around i think that's because we're all so used to taking photographs and thinking we've got to do things perfectly um maybe at some point there was going to be something up in this corner it's a wonderful wonderful portrait he's very young um of course he was incredibly young when he took on a lot of responsibility he took over the running of hinchingbrook aged only 16 17 um and at 17 he was also a colonel in the new model army under cromwell commanding a regiment of 100 men can you believe it um but he went on to have a very impressive career yes and i was just going to say one more thing about this lovely over mantle even though it has the date 1604 it was not put in here in 1604 this was when this room was remodeled where they wrote um it's in my book secrets of an english country house what they spent they lent what they i can't remember you can't start telling a story about a famous inscription do you know and not remember the inscription i know it's behind here apparently this was put in by the comptons yes um and it came from melplash court which is another manor house not far from here i've always felt rather sorry for mel plush and as though we should give it back it also doesn't quite fit because this ceiling was brought down if you look at the arch over here you can see that the original height of the ceiling was much higher but to fit these these steel joists and to fit this new arts and crafts ceiling they obviously had to lower everything and but you know what the inscription is behind here if there is one i'm gonna have to remind myself it is something around that this is our collection which is really exciting actually this collection is not in great shape is it well we have got so many awards that they're all crowding each other out look at that i know there we go they're mostly julies of course no they're not but um but i held i helped with one or two well i think this one should go over there because they're matched each other so this is the archive volunteering award for the alberta research project that we won in 2024 then this was when my channel my other channel was called american by countess it's now american countess for passing 200 subs and we're almost at 300 subs and they're passing 100 yeah but that was for passing you get it you get a silver for each hundred for each well you just only get one for a hundred thousand and the next one is a million so i'm still a long way off but getting there then of course last year we won the historic house's diversification award at 2025 the inaugural award for that and that's for all of our digital pioneering then we've got mapperton live for passing 100 000 subscribers we're almost at 200 000 we're this close to 200 000 so if you're watching this right now like subscribe subscribe subscribe subscribe then we have our other channel but notice how youtube is sort of youtube what are you thinking look how small that is they clearly they now have so many people at i know they're having to economize on the plaque but our other channel castles and tiaras which is repurposing our historic house episodes from american countess we put it out on here and we done very well done very well and then this is really my parents award for the nation's finest manor house that was received in 2006 when country life magazine ran a competition and it was voted on that looks better as being the nation's finest manor and once you are the nation's finest manor you are forever the nation's finest manor because they ain't making any new ones that's correct is that true that well it has to be so we're we're coming into the drawing room and you can see we have this roped off that's because we are open to the public and so we keep these ropes up because there are four tours a day which i mentioned previously but this is i think the smartest room in the house well it's got the grandest furniture and some of the best pictures um kicking off with the pictures of course we have this joshua reynolds portrait of the fourth earl of sandwich in his peers robes and i don't know if you can see but you've got obviously what would have been a wonderful silk robe with ermine at the top and then his little coronet just i know well no okay maybe not that one it's not that one looked a lot grander than the one that we've got anyway i always think he looks rather smug in this portrait rather pleased with himself he's probably done something incredibly important for example he might have um just um been appointed as first sea lord that was a very important uh position in the government and um he's really decked to the nines isn't he and he of course was married um once to to dorothy whom we don't have a portrait of instead of dorothy and i feel rather bad about this his mistress martha ray is sitting in the there and um that was his his mistress whom he discovered as a young singer in st james's park he heard her singing and thought who is this fine lady and then he became her patron and then all sorts of other things all sorts of things so i will also point out because these are dotted around the house um upstairs and downstairs and these are these wonderful these are by william hayes and they're the wonderful depiction of you can see the date here 1776 william hayes of these exotic birds now interesting going through the archives i read an account that hinching brook had an aviary so when you walked in because it was once a nunnery before the aether all closed off that you know you walk in and then there was that courtyard where that was open and it was an aviary and so with lots of exotic birds because martha ray liked exotic birds didn't she she's quite exotic herself but she liked exotic birds and that might have been why one of the reasons why hayes created all of these that's my discovery from the archives martha of course met an untimely end she was shot by an ex-lover who had had tried to woo her away from the fourth earl of sandwich here but i think martha knew which side her bread was buttered on and didn't um didn't fall or succumb to the charm a second time of james hackman who was then immediately arrested and hanged within two weeks and it was a very salacious story of the time i'm going to point out something in here because we do use this room but you're i know i'm on the sledge here but do you notice do you notice any you know cushions that might look a bit different and smarter i think i made it thank you thank you that would be me yeah so so here we go is that is that if i picked the right one i hope all of them i hope i picked the right one of them what have you had them re recovered no no so anyway when i was in here shooting for my book you realized that the cushions were in such a bad state and malcolm came with a bunch of cushions and then i said can i buy them from you because they worked perfectly so there's lots of other things to talk about in here we can't do why don't you do the suite of furniture well yes this is this is known as the nile suite and this suite of furniture so you've got the the bookcase over here another bookcase over there you've got a card table over there you've got a desk there and a side table here these commemorate the battle of the nile which was an important british victory in 1798 with nelson in command and so you can see at the top here you have these wonderful carved sphinxes um we don't know exactly who made this furniture it's it's from it was it was probably in the kind of school of of gillow of lancashire um but it is it is some of the finest furniture in the house and and people come from a long way to look at it i have noticed something julie wow look at this it says luke happy christmas love gay that's from abigail abigail so um so what i have noticed julie because julie is in charge of restoration in the house aren't you yeah so and conservation i know what have you noticed well i mean come on look over here this poor sphinx has fallen off his perch oh my gosh so he needs a bit of he's a bit of i'll do it i'll do that i'll do it no no not not blue tag well anyway there he goes up there so this room actually we use a lot for christmas because roughly uh in that area there we is where we put the christmas tree and um and i do remember as a child coming down here huge christmas tree lots of presents and an absolute desperation to get out of the long and boring lunch at the christmas table and get in here and pull apart our presents and of course our children have done that and i hope that our grandchildren will do that as well as we come this way i always think this is something worth looking at these are gaming chips now some people may know that the story of the sandwich has two flavors there's the flavor that we prefer is the family and then there's the flavor that others seem to go for which of course is to suggest that that magnificent gentleman the fourth earl was an unstoppable gambler and therefore he would gamble through the night and he needed a bit of bread to hold his meat to stop him from sullying his cards now some supporting evidence for that is that this is actually a gaming table um but of course this is much later than him we do know that his original card table is still in the town hall in huntingdon in cambridgeshire so that's possible and then we have these extraordinary gaming chips so if you look in here i think i think this is one of the these sort of unsung treasures of the house within here these are these are all made um i think they're either japanese or chinese somebody might have a better idea but each one of these chips and there are hundreds of them has engraved on it in immaculate detail the family coat of arms and you cannot quite believe that so many of these were carved so delicately out of mother of pearl for the gaming table yeah these these might easily be these this is a victorian quill well that this one hasn't been used and this one has been used on the other hand exactly is almost certainly a quill that has been used and you can see the ink at the end of of the nib so you had your ink reserve which might have been here and you would have written inside of something like this here we go there's actually got some there we go we've got some of my grandfather's old writing paper i haven't seen this for ages and here you go and so you might easily have had previous earls of sandwich writing away in ink and this is the bit you're going to miss and then after that you need to blot the ink so it doesn't smudge right well there's so much more to talk about we haven't talked about the books any of lots of the pictures this lovely hogarth oh we'll come back and do it again also can i just point out like going through this tour has been really helpful for me there's so many drawers that i still need to go through so comment down below if you want me literally while he was like talking i don't even know what you're talking about i was off in my own little world and there are drawers that i need to go through so if you want to see a video about that we can just one day go through all the drawers i literally i know that that sounds crazy i haven't been through half or even more than half of the drawers here and especially in this wonderful furniture right there is so much more to see in the drawing room that will have to happen another time this of course is the staircase hall one of the most important rooms of the house with lots of family portraits and it's something we're going to cover in the second part of this tour because we just don't have time today but we will do it when we do the rest of the house and into the library and i think today we shouldn't talk so much about the library as it is today this is the room that i remember as a child coming to and my grandfather being seated at an enormous desk over there and he had a big chair in fact he would sit on the burgermeister's chair and quite often i know can you believe it not great and then in here he used to have a television yeah so he'd open he'd open that cupboard and he had a big tv for those days it was a big tv and so he'd be able to sit here and he'd be sort of writing his stuff paying his bills watching television right there and the other thing to know about my grandfather is he was quite obsessed with technology when he lived at hinchingbrook he was the very first person to install an internal telephone system so all the rooms had phones and when he came here he became one of the first people to play around with computers so he'd always have the latest computer and i remember as a child having to show him how to switch the thing on anyway um there's there is another funny story my grandfather because this was all an open fireplace this wonderful tudor fireplace this obermantel again it's come from mel plash and it's james the first um so it's not really linked to the house at all another thing that we probably get it's royal coat of arms but do you think it was brought i can't remember when this was brought over so i can't say in time come to the comptons because they own both they own maverick and they own map and mel plash one day my grandfather was at his desk he had the fire on watching television and smoke started rising and if you come over here you can see that a log had fallen out of the fire onto the timber floor and started burning and i think it was actually the housekeeper who discovered it and um and saved the day anyway this room is now given over to julie's wonderful exhibition it's still got obviously the library or part of the library of family books some very important books over there particularly the first earl's journals which we've talked about before and we can come back to but i did so this room means a lot to me because when i was getting it ready for the exhibition space um i cleaned the entire rococo ceiling it took me 16 hours in total you probably watched that video it's beautifully clean still thank you there's no fire in here i it's not going to get dirty that's the problem so i was up i put the scaffolding in here cleaned all of that we painted it one color and then which we liked by the way mylands they gifted us the paint and we did really like it and then like six months later they came out with this whole other color chart and we were like oh my gosh this is the perfect color it's got a bit of it's got a bit of like leather color to it do you see that's why we really liked it there's a tinge it brings out brings out the leather bindings and it brings out again the the lovely stone on on the around the fire surround but it's brilliant right much smarter it's just when this is made into a library and we do again we've got concerts in here so we do use this room when it's not on tour we use it for concerts it is really lovely but it's lovely as it is the question is are we going to do an alberta exhibition next year or do we just go back to it being a library that people tour what do you think that is an open question and probably not one we will decide today we won't but um anyway i think that concludes most of the downstairs tour in fact probably only about half of it but we've got more next time we've got more upstairs and importantly we're going to go backstairs so we're going to go to the back of the house where we actually live and share with you all of the wonderful treasures and architecture of this extraordinary place thank you all for joining us be sure to like and subscribe because we'd like to get to 200 000 and turn notifications on