Burghley’s treasures
Burghley is one of England’s great country houses; a majestic presence, comfortably settled in a green Capability Brown-designed landscape and justly famous for the annual horse trials. The mansion house was built from the 1550s to the 1580s by William Cecil (1520-98), Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I. It represents the high point of Elizabethan courtier houses, like Longleat and Kirby Hall, that celebrated Burghley’s family roots, enhancing the place from which he drew his title (as first Lord Burghley) – although the house was less extensive and glamorous than his great house at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, where he often entertained the queen.
Internal alterations were carried out in the 1680s and ’90s for his great-great-grandson, the fifth Earl of Exeter. His work was finished and extended by the ninth Earl in the 1770s and ’80s, with Capability Brown as both architect and landscape designer. Despite all this, from the outside the house retains its glorious fantasy castle quality, with its famous pyramid-capped clock tower in the internal courtyard and the dramatic bowed windows of the aptly named Bow Room. The whole is topped off with an improbable but memorable forest of
