Cragside House

Cragside is a Victorian country house near the town of Rothbury in Northumberland. This extraordinary National Trust property not only boasts Victorian interiors that are impressively well preserved – the decoration here is itself superlative. Featuring designs by William Morris, Rossetti, Philip Webb and Burne-Jones, the rooms at Cragside House are also filled with inventions many years before their time, including a primitive dishwasher, internal telephone communication, a rotating spit in the kitchen and hydro-electric lights. The Drawing Room is the centrepiece of the house, dominated by an enormous marble fireplace and fitted with an elliptical glass ceiling, while the grounds were approached with equal levels of ambition. The owners, Lord and Lady Armstrong, oversaw the planting of 7million trees on the 1,000 acre estate, as well as the creation of garden ‘rooms’, each unique and extraordinary in its own way. This 19th century Victorian vision has resulted in a Pinetum, filled with non-native conifers, that includes five out of the ten tallest trees of this kind in the UK.