CARLTON TOWERS

Marvel at exquisite Victorian Gothic-revival architecture, savor a vineyard tour with wine tasting in the estate’s walled garden vineyard, and relish homemade treats at the Stables Tearoom.

Carlton Towers

Carlton Towers has more the look of a Cambridge college about it than a stately home. It was acquired by the Stapleton family – from whom the current owner, Lord Gerald Fitzalan-Howard is descended – in 1301, and there’s been a house on the site ever since. The current one, with its memorable clock tower – erected in 1777 by Thomas Stapleton – was extravagantly rebuilt in the 1870s by Henry Stapleton, 9th Baron Beaumont and the architect Edward Welby Pugin. His son Miles married Ethel Tempest, an heiress from Broughton Hall, near Skipton, whose money helped pay off the significant debts that had accumulated in the rebuilding of Carlton. When Miles died aged 45, having accidentally shot himself climbing a stile, his infant daughter Mona inherited Carlton. In 1914, she married Bernard Fitzalan-Howard, 3rd Baron Howard of Glossop, then heir to another Bernard Fitzalan-Howard, 16th Duke of Norfolk.

When Bernard Norfolk died in 1975, Mona and Bernard’s son Miles became 17th Duke of Norfolk, and Carlton was subsumed into the Norfolk estates. Miles Norfolk’s younger son Lord Gerald Fitzalan-Howard and his wife Emma moved into a fairly dilapidated Carlton in 1990 with their young family, and set about  tidying it all up, installing en suite bathrooms, and making the house a home again, as well as a popular wedding and events venue.