The National Trust's un-restored country house, kept in the peeling, cluttered state it was found in, with an old deer park around it
Open to visitorsa National Trust place — check opening times and admission before you go
When the National Trust took on Calke Abbey in 1985 it decided, unusually, to leave it alone. The rooms are shown much as the Harpur Crewe family left them: peeling paint, stopped clocks, and the accumulated hoard of a family who threw very little away over nearly three hundred years — stuffed birds, mounted heads, cases of shells and minerals, a state bed that was never even unpacked. The Trust halted the decay but did not tidy it, so the place is a record of how a country estate runs down rather than how it shows off.
The house itself is a baroque mansion built between 1701 and 1704 for Sir John Harpur, on the site of a medieval priory. The name Calke Abbey was only attached in 1808, and it was never actually an abbey. Around it are walled gardens, a kitchen garden and an orangery, with an auricula theatre for showing off potted flowers in season.
The wider parkland, some 217 hectares of it, is a National Nature Reserve, grazed by deer and studded with ancient oaks; one of them, the Old Man of Calke, is reckoned to be around a thousand years old. The house and gardens are a paid attraction with set opening hours. Melbourne Hall and its formal gardens lie a few miles north-east, and the National Forest Way runs past the edge of the estate. The old limestone diggings at Ticknall Quarries, now taken over by wildlife, sit just to the north.
