Weekend PARADISE

Out hunting one day Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild first glimpsed the spectacular views that can be enjoyed from the hill where Waddesdon Manor now stands. “There was not a bush to be seen or a bird to be heard,” he later said. The memory must have lingered, because when the Duke of Marlborough put the Buckinghamshire estate up for sale in 1874, Baron Ferdinand snapped it up – all 2,700 acres. “I had been looking out for a residential estate for some time,” he wrote in 1897. Waddesdon was far from ideal, however. It was, he noted, “all farm land, chiefly arable, with neither a house nor a park” and the nearest train station was six miles away in Aylesbury, despite the estate