Belvoir Castle Leicestershire

One of the icons of the East Midlands really knows how to put on a show.

- Mary Bremner

Belvoir Castle, home to the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, sits in the Vale of Belvoir amid 17,000 acres of prime Leicestershire land. The castle, built in the early 1800s, dominates the landscape and can be seen for miles. It’s quite an impressive sight, especially on the frosty morning of our visit when the turrets could be seen poking above the mist.

The estate is renowned for its partridges but also has an ex cellent pheasant shoot, mainly in the woods, which is what we were going to enjoy on this day, a couple of weeks before Christmas. Upon our arrival, we were met by the sight of a series of lorries and a massive light shining on the castle walls. Today we would be sharing the shoot with the cast and crew of The Crown, who were filming here (Belvoir stands in for Windsor Castle and filming had been going on here for about a week with lots of people milling around).

After initial confusion about which shoot we would be joining, we entered the castle, traversed our way around the film crew, to estate manager Phil Burtt. Phil came to the estate 11 years ago to advise and redesign the shoot. Eight years ago he took on the farms with the estate now farming 4,000 acres in-hand.

“It works well that I run the farms and estate as well as the shoot, as I can say exactly where I want the cover crops to be, and can put them in myself,” Phil explained. He has been working hard, re-landscaping parts of the estate, clearing drives and resurrecting and replanting some of the parkland Capability Brown designed but which had subsequently been allowed to go wild.