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Updated: October 6, 2025
KENELM CHILLINGLY has now been several days a guest at Neesdale Park. He has recovered speech; the other guests have gone, including George Belvoir. Leopold Travers has taken a great fancy to Kenelm.
The whole vale of Belvoir, and miles of meadow and woodland, lie stretched below it, like a map unrolled to the distant horizon, presenting extensive and varied prospects in every direction; while from the glen which surrounds the castle-hill, like a deep moat filled with a forest, the spring winds swell up as from a sea of woodland, and the snatches of birds' carolling, and cawing rooks' discourse, float up to one from the topmost branches of tall trees, far below one's feet, as one stands on the battlemented terraces."
Sometimes when he was busy at this kind of work, a tall, white-haired gentleman would come over from Belvoir to see what he was doing and to talk with him. This gentleman was Sir Thomas Fairfax, a cousin of the owner of Belvoir.
All round about new and neat residences for city people are springing up, with fine names, Eldon Terrace, Rose Cottage, Belvoir Villa, etc., etc., with little patches of ornamented garden or lawn in front, and heaps of curious rock-work, with which the English are ridiculously fond of adorning their front yards.
Again, it was during Crabbe's residence at Belvoir that the Duke's brother, Lord Robert Manners, died of wounds received while leading his ship, Resolution, against the French in the West Indies, in the April of 1782.
"Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er," George Crabbe and his bride settled down in their apartments at Belvoir Castle, but difficulties soon arose.
The Duke of Rutland dined some little time ago at the Palace, and speaking of the late party at Belvoir, mentioned me, when the Queen asked why I didn't have myself presented? "You ask me how I managed about diamonds to go to Court in?" she wrote afterwards in reply to a friend's question.
The next day I walked to Harrogate, passing through Otley and across the celebrated Wharf Vale. The scenery of this valley, as it opens upon you suddenly on descending from the south into Otley, is exceedingly beautiful; not so extensive as that of Belvoir Vale, but with all the features of the latter landscape compressed in a smaller space; like a portrait taken on a smaller scale.
"The numberless allusions," he writes, "to the nature of a literary dependent's existence in a great lord's house, which occur in my father's writings, and especially in the tale of The Patron, are, however, quite enough, to lead any one who knew his character and feelings to the conclusion that notwithstanding the kindness and condescension of the Duke and Duchess themselves which were, I believe, uniform, and of which he always spoke with gratitude the situation he filled at Belvoir was attended with many painful circumstances, and productive in his mind of some of the acutest sensations of wounded pride that have ever been traced by any pen."
The first was a head cut out of a ruined picture that had only in part escaped destruction when Belvoir Castle was burned down at the beginning of this century. I did not see the head but have little doubt it was genuine. It was offered me for a pound; I was not equal to the occasion and did not at once go to see it as I ought, and when I attended to it some months later the thing had gone.
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