‘Our estate attracts 20,000 visitors a year – even though it’s been demolished’

Great Estates: Only Easton’s entrance hall was spared from destruction – after the bulldozer broke down

On a stone in the middle of Easton Walled Gardens, nine miles from Grantham, is the spot that marks where the front door of Easton Hall used to be. 
Now, only an entrance hall remains – the rest was demolished in 1951. It feels only slightly ghostly. 
Ursula Cholmeley, Lady Cholmeley, wife of Sir Fred Cholmeley, 7th Baronet and I stand on this tablet, looking out over the garden – imagining what life would have been like there when there was not only a front door at Easton, but a whole house too. 
If the story of the upper class in the 20th century is one of decline, and in the 21st century of renewal, then the Cholmeleys personify both. When Sir Hugh Cholmeley, 3rd Baronet died in 1904, the then 11,000-acre Easton estate, bought by his ancestor in 1561, passed to his son Sir Montague, 4th Baronet. 
The new baronet had scarcely a decade at the helm of Easton. On Christmas Eve 1914 he was killed in action in France, leaving Easton and the baronetcy to his eight-year-old son, Hugh. The house had been let for some years, and it continued in this way, out of sight. 
Shortly before war was declared in 1939, Sir Hugh moved back to Easton. Like his father, he had only scant chance to get to know it, since with the war came Easton’s requisitioning as a Royal Artillery barracks. 
In the locale, the Cholmeleys got the short straw, says Lady Cholmeley: “Belvoir [Castle] had the National Archives, Stoke Rochford [Hall] got the officers, and we had the men. But Fred’s grandfather [Sir Hugh] was a very good man – he thought that he should take one for his country. 
“If his house was to be a barracks, then his house was to be a barracks for the war effort, that’s how he would have seen it.”
While Sir Hugh survived the war – winning the DSO (distinguished service order) in Italy with the Grenadier Guards – Easton did not. 
“The soldiers let off rounds in the house, and threw grenades into the greenhouses,” says Lady Cholmeley. 
No maintenance was done: gutters went unemptied, roofs unmended, and the house was trashed. When Sir Hugh returned to Easton, he was horrified by what he found, and with his wife and their son Monty, born in 1935, he retreated to the dower house. 
After lead was stolen from the roof in 1950, Sir Hugh, like many of his peers suffering with decrepit properties, took the gut-wrenching decision to demolish Easton. 
All that remains of the house is an entrance hall, left over by the demolition crew after the bulldozer broke down. 
Is there a family sadness that the house is no more? “It wasn’t so much sadness but a feeling of complete hopelessness that there was no way forward,” says Lady Cholmeley. “The miracle is that there’s this much left.”
Sir Hugh died aged 57 in 1964, distraught by what had happened, aching with the burden of his family’s losses, and never knowing his grandson Fred. A JP and a vice-lieutenant, in his last years he ran the estate in an old-fashioned but typical way for a man of his generation. 
“He was very generous but he was a hopeless businessman,” says Lady Cholmeley. Somehow, this turned out to be a saviour of the estate. “When they widened the A1, [the authorities] said ‘we’ll give you whatever it was an acre’, which was about a quarter of what it was worth. He just accepted it. 
“After he died, the Inland Revenue came round and said ‘we want X for inheritance tax’. [The family] said, ‘but you just valued it at Y’, so the whole estate was valued at the lower rate.”
Sir Fred’s parents never moved into the dower house, but made their lives in a nearby farmhouse. With high taxation, says Lady Cholmeley, “there was no incentive for them to do anything with Easton. Fred’s father used to say, if the house hadn’t been pulled down, it would be all brick and no dirt.” 
Easton became a job for the next generation. The present Cholmeleys married in 1993 and moved into the dower house after their honeymoon, aged 22 and 25. They began their family with their son Monty, in 1997. 
Unfortunately, 18 months later, Fred’s father Sir Monty Cholmeley, 6th Baronet died aged 63. “He was so moved when we had Monty, because I think he thought that was the end of everything,” says Lady Cholmeley. “I’m so thrilled that he lived long enough to know that he had a grandson.” 
With his father’s death, Sir Fred was promoted, aged 30, and became the owner of Easton. The transfer of power gave the new Cholmeleys “a strange kind of freedom,” says Lady Cholmeley. “Fred’s dad was very generous and said ‘do what you want,’ and Fred was like, ‘no no no, it’s your estate’. There was this kindness between the two of them which was stopping anything from happening.”
Three years later, in 2001, Lady Cholmeley – a title she uses at Easton “but nowhere else because here it’s my job title: it’s irrelevant in modern society but it’s still relevant in a community” – decided to restore the gardens. 
Initially, she had been put off the idea. “I thought, there’s no point, there’s no house, and it took a long time for the penny to drop that because there’s no house it’ll work. We had the stables made into an area for visitors.” 
She started with the bridge across the Witham, which had yew trees growing out of it, and went along, bit by bit, battling the rabbits that ate everything in sight. 
Making Easton work has been a learning curve, but starting from such a low ebb meant “everything we did was a triumph,” says Lady Cholmeley. 
When I ask whether restoring a house would have been easier than a derelict garden, dominated by brambles, she laughs, describing herself as “not very domesticated”. 
“I’m truly grateful that I had to deal with gardening. I love being outside, I think I was the right person in the right place,” she adds.
Now, Easton is a model for a 21st century estate. When I visit, the 12-acre gardens are bursting with Lady Cholmeley’s glorious roses, the beginning of her famous sweetpeas, and her white space garden – an homage to the late landscape designer Charles Jencks – is filled with peonies, alliums, foxgloves, and cosmos. 
As well as the gardens, the Cholmeleys run five holiday lets at Easton and The Cholmeley Arms pub in nearby Burton-le-Coggles, while the gardens attract 20,000 visitors a year. In May, Griffin of Easton, a new book and stationery shop opened in the courtyard, adding to the free-to-access shop and coffee shop.
Things are happier at Easton than they have been for a long time – but it’s not easy. “The tearoom makes money, the holiday lets make money, the shop makes money – but all of the money from everything else just goes straight back into the gardens,” says Lady Cholmeley. 
The gardens are like the house would be if it was still standing: a money-sucking asset. So why does she do it? “With the hope that one day it might wash its face. That would be nice. 
“There was no community here at all, and this has put the heart back into the estate. The estate has a figurehead again. It isn’t just a collection of houses and fields – it really has a centre.”