Elvaston Castle

Until the 16th century the Elvaston estate belonged to Shelford Priory. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries the Crown sold the priory and its lands in 1538 to Sir Michael Stanhope of Rampton in Nottinghamshire, and in 1629 a later Sir John Stanhope granted the estate to his second son — another Sir John, High Sheriff of Derbyshire — for whom the manor house was built in 1633.

In the early 19th century Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Harrington, had the Elizabethan-style house redesigned and extended in grand Gothic Revival style by James Wyatt, who drew up a new wing, a new great hall and most of the interiors — but died before the work was finished. His designs were carried out by Robert Walker between 1815 and 1829, and in 1836 Lewis Nockalls Cottingham remodelled the Elizabethan south front to match the rest of the now Gothic castle.

A further round of alterations followed in 1860–61, executed by Robert Bridgart's building company of Friar Gate, Derby, under the architects Giles & Brookhouse. Bridgart died in 1860 with the works still in progress, and his son took over to see them through.

The 3rd Earl had approached Capability Brown to remodel the grounds, but Brown turned the commission down: the estate was so flat, he said, that it had "no capability". In 1830 the 4th Earl, another Charles Stanhope, commissioned the landscape gardener William Barron instead. The Earl had caused scandal by marrying the actress Maria Foote, seventeen years his junior; the couple were described as "inseparable and besotted", and he wanted the gardens as a "private and secluded oasis of great beauty" for the two of them. Barron spent the next twenty years on the work, moving full-grown trees with a tree-planting machine of his own design to give the Earl his effect at once.

After the death of their only son at the age of four, the couple shut themselves away at Elvaston, forbidding anyone entry to the grounds. When the 4th Earl died in 1851 his brother Leicester Stanhope, the 5th Earl, opened the gardens to the public, and they became renowned as "a Gothic paradise".

During the Second World War the house became a teacher training college after the original college in Derby was evacuated. The college left in 1947 and the house then stood mostly empty for two decades. In 1969, in the wake of the Countryside Act 1968, William Stanhope, 11th Earl of Harrington, sold the estate to Derbyshire County Council, which opened it to the public in 1970 as Elvaston Castle Country Park; in 1969 the estate had also served as a location for Ken Russell's film of Women in Love.

The gardens and park were brought back into good heart, but the castle itself was judged unsafe and closed to visitors by 1990, and it has been on the Buildings at Risk Register since 2008; a 2006 report put essential repairs to castle and estate at no less than £6.1 million. The independent Elvaston Castle and Gardens Trust was formed in 2017 to manage the estate once restoration works, already underway, were complete — but in March 2025, citing rising costs, the county council announced that the castle and grounds were to be put up for sale, with the grounds remaining open to the public at that time.