Other in Cheshire

Lyme Park is one of the grandest historic estates in the north of England, an Italianate mansion set within 1,400 acres of moorland, parkland, formal gardens and ancient deer park on the edge of the Peak District in Cheshire. The estate has been associated with the Legh family for nearly 600 years, and the house they developed over centuries into the palatial building visible today is an exceptional example of the evolving ambitions of an English aristocratic family. The house's current exterior appearance owes most to a Baroque remodelling carried out by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni between 1725 and 1735, which transformed an earlier Elizabethan building into a building of considerable grandeur with classical colonnades, formal courtyards and a theatrical south front that faces the lake and deer park. The interior preserves rooms from several periods, including Elizabethan panelling, Restoration carving and the formal reception rooms developed for eighteenth-century entertaining. The Clock Tower courtyard retains the feel of the earlier Tudor building beneath the later classical veneer. The gardens were developed over many centuries and include a formal Dutch garden, an English garden, a reflecting pool and the Victorian parterre. Humphry Repton, one of the most influential landscape designers in English history, was consulted about the wider park landscape and his recommendations helped shape the relationship between the house and the moorland setting that gives Lyme Park its distinctive character. The Cheshire Gate, a dramatic Victorian folly, provides one of the most striking viewpoints over the surrounding landscape. Lyme Park achieved a new wave of popular recognition when it was used as the filming location for Pemberley in the 1995 BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The shot of Colin Firth emerging from the lake in his wet shirt is one of the most discussed moments in British television history, and the park still attracts many visitors who come specifically to see the location. The red deer herd that roams the moorland and parkland is one of the features that most surprises first-time visitors. Seeing a large herd of deer moving across the open moorland above the house, with the Cheshire Plain stretching to the horizon below, is a genuinely memorable experience. Entry to the park is free; a charge applies for the house and gardens.

The Peak District was designated England's first national park in 1951 and remains one of the most visited in the world, a landscape of extraordinary variety covering approximately 1,438 square kilometres of the southern Pennines that combines the gritstone moorlands and edges of the Dark Peak to the north with the limestone dales and white rock of the White Peak to the south in a contrast of landscape characters that provides an almost unlimited range of walking, cycling and outdoor recreation within easy reach of several large English cities. The Dark Peak, named for the dark gritstone that underlies the high moorland, is a landscape of severe and dramatic character. The great moorland plateaux of Kinder Scout, Bleaklow and Black Hill, reaching over 600 metres and covered in blanket peat and cotton grass, provide the most challenging and most atmospheric walking in the park, their vast, trackless expanses a contrast to the more developed landscapes of the surrounding towns. The gritstone edges, including Stanage, Froggatt and Curbar, are among the finest rock climbing venues in Britain and provide excellent ridge walking with views over the moorland to the east and the Derwent valley to the west. The White Peak to the south and centre of the park is a landscape of a quite different character, its limestone dales, ancient meadows and stone-walled farmland creating a pastoral and intimate scenery that is accessible and gentle by comparison with the moorland above. Dovedale, Lathkill Dale and the Manifold Valley are among the finest limestone dales in Britain, their clear streams, wooded slopes and exposed white limestone creating a landscape of delicate beauty that draws walkers and cyclists in great numbers. The market towns of Bakewell, Buxton and Matlock Bath provide visitor services and historical interest, and the great country houses of Chatsworth, Haddon Hall and Hardwick Hall are all within or on the edge of the park.