Country Houses I've Worked at: Renishaw Hall & Gardens

(all photographs in this post copyright of Renishaw Hall unless otherwise stated)

Renishaw Hall is a privately owned country house just outside the City of Sheffield in South Yorkshire. It is the seat of the Sitwell Family who have lived there for almost 400 years. The house was built in 1625 and has passed exclusively through family hands ever since.

If you’re familiar with Downton Abbey (and if you’re not, where have you been?) you’ll know the main story which dominated the first season was the ‘matter of the entail’ where Lady Mary fought for her right to be declared the heiress of Downton. Sadly in Downton Abbey she is unsuccessful, but at Renishaw Hall the entail was successfully broken in 2009 when Sir Reresby Sitwell, 6th Baronet broke the entail so his daughter Alexandra could inherit. The Baronetcy passed on to a male heir in the family, thus separating estate and title for the first time in the family’s history.

The House itself is beautiful and is in my opinion so different from any other country house in the Yorkshire area. It was built of ashlar and sandstone with beautiful crenellated parapets and pinnacles. It has pitched slate roofs where we lit a beacon for the Queens Jubilee in 2012 – yes a beacon on the roof of a highly flammable country house . . . my heart was in my throat from the moment it was lit until it was extinguished!

The interior of the house is lovely too with some very unassuming and cosy rooms such as the entrance hall which features a roaring fire with comfy chairs pulled around it, or the library with the widescreen tv in it. It also has some beautiful formal rooms and all of these can be seen during house tours which are conducted regularly.

But really it is the gardens which steal the show at Renishaw Hall. They were named at HHA and Christie’s 2015 ‘Garden of the Year’ and you can really see why. They are a mixture of formal lawns with flower beds displaying hundreds of species of flower overlooked by perfectly trimmed box hedges, and informal woodland where in early spring bluebells cover the ground – people come from miles to see the bluebells each year. If you’re up for a nice walk then the lake right at the bottom of the estate allows you to escape into a natural paradise.

(photo credit: panoramio.com)

I worked at Renishaw Hall from April 2011 until September 2012 as the Operations Manager. This role made me responsible for the opening of the Hall and estate to the public on a daily basis – not an easy task I can assure you. It was made harder by the fact it was my first proper heritage job after graduating with my Masters Degree, not including Lamport Hall. Let me tell you it was a steep learning curve and there were plenty of moments when I thought ‘I don’t think I can do this’ but over time I learned the job and (if I do say so myself) I think I was pretty good at it.

In my time there I worked alongside a wonderful team including a PR expert, administration assistants, paid visitor services staff and volunteers, not to mention working with Alexandra herself. I did just about everything you can imagine is involved in opening a country house to the public . . . I was responsible for financial reconciliations, budgets and reports, worked on marketing plans with the PR expert Jane, devised and led a full events programme, sourced merchandise for the gift shop, worked with the cafe to produce catering for events, recruited seasonal staff, helped with museum curation, wrote newsletters, managed social media, created new signage for the site, took admissions in the kiosk, cleaned toilets, took car park money on the gate, drove the mobility scooter and much much more!

I left Renishaw Hall in September once the house closed to the public as Alexandra had decided to move the visitor offer in a new direction, one which didn’t need a full time Operations Manager and so I needed to find another role which was on a par with the vast experience I had gained in just over a year. I was very sad to leave though because I had loved my time at Renishaw. It was hard at times but the highs were greatly outweighed by the lows and to be able to walk around such beautiful gardens and grounds on a daily basis made it a wonderfully uplifting place to be.