Fictional Pemberley... Chatsworth House
Share
We are in deepest Derbyshire, climbing a steep rutted track lined with ancient trees. A dunnock wheezes a thin concerto. No hint of the 21st Century. Just the place for a stepping-out-of-the-Tardis moment.
So we picture a demure English lady writer, riding sedately downhill towards us. It is 1806. She pauses, glances forwards with a keen eye and, on the other side of the valley below, sees…Mr Darcy’s country seat.
We turn to share what might have been Jane Austen’s first view of the fictional Pemberley, and the real Chatsworth House, basking gold in the sun, as vast as a palace. To be mistress here “might indeed be something,” thought Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, with wistful understatement.
Well, she was going to be, as soon as Darcy finished his swim. (Jane slips some convenient water into her scene-setting. We can see the decoratively widened Derwent – her “stream of some natural importance...swelled into greater.” But she didn’t mention the wet shirt of the BBC serialization.)
The next outbreak of Pride and Prejudice mania came in 2004 with a new film of one of the most popular novels in our language, starring Keira Knightley, Matthew MacFadyen and Dame Judi Dench. There is now a new travel hazard on this - fortunately car-free - track. Expect to meet Austen addicts with their noses in the book wandering down this hill, nodding knowingly as the magnificent landscape falls into place.
Nobody knows for sure if Jane ever visited the putative inspiration for Darcy’s home. But if she did, I see her taking this same very old route the three miles over the hill from Bakewell. And why not Lizzy too? Bakewell was her last call before she meets her buttoned-up admirer at Pemberley on page 240. It’s the direct, and scenic, route, after all.
The Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth House is a star of the film. And so is the Peak Park scenery. But it’s more complicated than that. Take care when you research this treasured wedge of countryside using your DVD player rather than a travel book as a guide. Movies can deceive.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged in the film business that locations are never quite where you expect them to be. Prague often stands in for Paris. Romanian mountains masquerade as the Appalachians. It’s the same in the new P&P. During the game they sub Chatsworth for a second “Pemberley”, Haddon Hall in the Duke of Rutland’s domain in the next valley along.
We planned our expedition into Derbyshire’s costume drama triangle over breakfast at our hotel, the 350 year old Peacock at Rowsley, freshly refurbished by the Haddon estate. When they took their prodigal hotel back in 2002, 50 years after they sold it, they fitted it with antique furniture from the family’s Belvoir Castle to celebrate.
Two centuries of artists and poets arriving by the London to Manchester railway and the A6 would have paused here to decide which of the two gilded valleys to set to verse or canvas – the Derwent on the right, or the Wye on the left. Like the film crew, we settled for both – with Chatsworth first.
This is the gentle centre of the Peaks District, away from the highest moors. Rowsley sits under one of Jane’s typical hills, "crowned with wood", although she didn’t mention that the trees on this one were like a fine, Mohican hair cut.
<< Part 1 >> << Part 2 >>
Average customer rating
awaiting 5 vote(s)...
Email
Add to your Pocket Guide
Why Register?
