Baronet's Diary

During lockdown we welcomed 3,000 visitors but they were not particularly good at social distancing. The guests in question were in fact a swarm of honey bees. I had been aware of their presence as I walked in front of the Hall each evening and in the hot weeks of June the noise had got greater. With worries they might be a danger to the family, I sought help from Mansfield honey bee keepers Martyn and Andy to extract them. As usual with Tissington Hall this was no straightforward matter. First we ‘unpeeled’ the lead from the roof, then cut through the wooden structures to find my lodgers. Martyn and Andy attended one morning to lure them into a beekeeping basket as well as taking the honeycomb they had created in the crevice of the roof. In total, Martyn and Andy took away a total of 20 litres of ‘Tissington’ honey as well as our errant visitors. We kept some and it was delicious!…

We have all suffered in the long period of lockdown and some have suffered more than most. The most difficult aspect of the hospitality sector is that we have missed out on months of weddings, visitors to the cottages, customers to the Tearooms and so much more. Of these, the wedding couples are the most difficult to satiate as it is not moral to charge them twice for a booked date in 2020 (now cancelled) and a re-arranged date possibly in 2021.…

After my musings about the Seventh ‘Well’ in the village created from the combined shenanigans of Severn Trent and the Highways Department, the situation got worse following the two storms in February, namely Ciara and Dennis. After the dreadful floods before Christmas, these two put water where I had never seen it before in all the 30 years I’ve lived at Tissington. As in previous wet situations it is not advisable to try to cross the ford except in a large 4x4 or tractor and this poor Mercedes proved the point as it ground to a halt midway across. Usually vehicles are removed pretty immediately but this car remained there for at least seven days. It may even still be there (as other larger vehicles can traverse around it) as you read this… or it may have floated downstream!…

It is 33 years since I was first asked to be a best man. After my first appearance, for James Proudlock on his marriage to Joanna in 1987, I was next on parade in 2006 when I performed the task for Hugh LeFanu’s marriage to Sara in the comfort of our own home. I was in the hot seat again this January, to toast the marriage of Andrew Bruce to his Italian bride Barbara in London. On this occasion I had the luxury of a joint best man – Andrew Norman. We cobbled the speech together over coffee and cake at the Attenborough Nature Reserve (halfway to Nottingham), which was a suitable midway rendezvous. I suspect that 33 years on I was a little less nervous as I came to deliver our speech so that the guests enjoyed our joint ribbing of the groom. It is a task that I doubt I will do again but we all enjoyed the nuptials of this merry couple…

It is always agreeable to be featured in a newspaper article but to get a whole page in a national Sunday broadsheet was fantastic, not just for the publicity it generated but also for the acknowledgement of the hard work that all our teams put in to keep the Hall and the Estate going. Sunday Telegraph reporter Eleanor Doughty penned a piece on Tissington in the ‘Great Estates’ feature before Christmas under the headline ‘Is that Lady FitzHerbert clearing the tables?’. Indeed the answer was ‘Yes’ and we can prove it as on New Year’s Eve and Day both Fiona and I were furiously clearing tables, collecting trays and loading the industrial dishwasher to serve the happy visitors. We even had a few comments on TripAdvisor. It was a charming piece… a copy of which is framed and hanging on the wall at Herbert’s if you would like to see it.

I wrote in September about the struggles of Ashbourne’s High Street with the closure of various stores. Better news is at hand. A public meeting with District Council leader Garry Purdy and shopholders has culminated in the formation of the ‘Ashbourne Town Team’, under the guidance of Anne Wright of Young Ideas. Already the group has involved district and county councillors and created a website www.ashbournetownteam.co.uk. Watch this space as the project evolves.