Lord Carnarvon is the 8th Earl of Carnarvon and custodian of Highclere Castle, the real-life setting of Downton Abbey. An entrepreneur and conversationist, he has revitalised the estate through ventures such as Highclere Castle Gin, Horse Feeds and the Egyptian Exhibition.

Drive through the gates into Highclere Park and you feel as if you are entering another world, a magical unfolding landscape. The glorious 18th century parkland offers and obscures glimpses of the Castle towers hidden behind the majestic Cedars of Lebanon.

The Castle itself is a triumph of early Victorian design and engineering and (of course) a much-loved key element in the worldwide success of the Downton Abbey TV series and feature films.

We never tire of the beauty of the buildings and landscape, but it is the glory of past design that has been the challenge for much of my life. Whilst it has been a privilege to live at Highclere since my university days, I often wondered how to keep this amazing place together, given that so many structures – cottages, follies, parts of the Castle – were slowly deteriorating.

Like many other beautiful estates, Highclere received significant investment in the late 1800s and was part of the Belle Époque years leading up to the start of WWI.  The end of the first war bought a very different era of much higher taxes and economic uncertainty, followed by financial depressions in the late 1920s and 1930s. Fifty years later, the high inflation of the 1970s largely curbed investment in estate infrastructure and repairs.

My grandfather had kindly given me a significant part of the Estate when I reached 25, but I soon discovered this included cottages much in need of repair. Queues of tenants appeared (quite rightly) asking for modernised plumbing, electricity and watertight roofs!

The 19th century follies were not looking happy, and perhaps one of the most beautiful, the Temple of Diana overlooking Dunsmere Lake had a tree growing out of its rotunda, with stone flaking off in all directions.

My grandfather had kindly given me a significant part of the Estate when I reached 25, but I soon discovered this included cottages much in need of repair. Queues of tenants appeared (quite rightly) asking for modernised plumbing, electricity and watertight roofs!

The 19th century follies were not looking happy, and perhaps one of the most beautiful, the Temple of Diana overlooking Dunsmere Lake had a tree growing out of its rotunda, with stone flaking off in all directions.

My father and I opened Highclere to the public in 1988, and some entrepreneurial activity bought glimmers of hope for better returns to the Estate. As ever, farming was producing very low returns, but my father had great connections to the racing world. He sent his horses to Richard Hannon Sr who asked about a more consistent supply of high-quality oats for the racehorses: horses cannot eat oats straight off the field. The hard outer husk must be removed as well as all dust and then only the heavier grains are good enough for the top-class thoroughbreds.

Sourcing second hand equipment from Scotland for milling oats, we created Highclere Castle Horse Feeds, which has made a major contribution in improved margins to the farm, as well as establishing a reputation for quality oats and haylage. Richard Hannon Jr’s horses alone have won 553 races and £13.6m in prize money in the last five years, all powered by Highclere Estate oats.

Our links with Newbury racecourse are historic, as it was partly founded by my great-grandfather, the 5th Earl, and an interesting marketing link is that we sponsor races both in the name of Highclere Castle Horse Feeds and Highclere Castle Gin. There is a common thread, too: the smoothness of our gin is a result of using our oats in the botanical process.

The 1990s was a decade of innovation around the Castle, hosting weddings and corporate events such as car launches, while I was also working in London with partners in  interesting technology businesses such as Telecom Express, a successful automated telephone services operation which (among many other projects) ran the Daily Telegraph’s Premium Rate dating service, and also installed the system for speaking the winning numbers for Camelot and the first National lottery.

This side investment helped the Estate, and gave me a background in systems design, which was put to good use when designing our first online barcode ticket system. I think we were one of the first historic houses to offer this way of buying tickets.

My father sadly died in 2001, and from 2003 Fiona and I took over the Castle business with this amazing asset, but a cash balance of near zero, with the realization that we had to fix the high Saloon roof in short order as water was appearing in strange places on rainy days.

The boom years before the 2008 financial crash gave us a fair wind and we fixed the roof with tons of new lead and thousands of slates, working day and night on many weekdays and Saturday evenings, and running events to fund the considerable costs.

Our first serious entrepreneurial venture was the creation of our Ancient Egyptian exhibition in the Castle cellar.  We were fortunate to have a collection of real objects from the time of the 5th Earl’s work in Luxor, but our goal was also to recreate the excitement of the story of the discovery of Tutankhamun.

The best replicas from Tutankhamun would be key to making the project a success with our visitors. Wonderful craftsman who loved Egyptology had created a brilliant Tutankhamun Museum of replicas in the wilds of Cornwall. It suffered because of difficult access, so we offered to buy the replica collection.

Fiona and I then had to get to work to create a circular walk needing a new linking tunnel of some six metres in the depths of the Castle cellars. It was no easy task to find a safe place to tunnel through what looked like solid foundations whilst avoiding any key structural points and collateral damage.

Using techniques similar to mining in shallow seams with long narrow drills, we managed to spread a film of red dust from the cellars to most areas of the Castle. Finally, we broke through safely and created a steel structure around our new tunnel.

Fiona and I spent much of 2008 & 2009 living like moles in the dark of the Castle cellars. We were lucky to find some brilliant Polish display cabinet craftsmen who helped us build this incredible new exhibition. Fiona, being the more academic of our team, wrote up much of the interpretation, while I was busy procuring all the Tutankhamun replicas.

Fiona’s skill in ancient Hieroglyphs allowed us to create what has been recognised as an authentic and really educational exhibition which is seen by just over 50% of our visitors. The considerable investment and risk have made a positive return in every way: people of all ages enjoy the extraordinary skills and accomplishments of this ancient world.

It was a risky project with high costs, and plenty of things to go wrong, from construction issues around the new tunnel to actually obtaining the fantastic replicas, but with persistence, it all came together and has made a valuable contribution to the Castle building and wider estate.

Little did we know that Highclere would be chosen as the location for a new show to be called Downton Abbey.  In 2010 it would introduce the Castle to a global audience and the building itself become a much-loved character in its fictional world.

It gave us a chance to develop a brand, and Fiona got this idea off to a flying start with her New York Times bestseller Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey relating how Almina (née Rothschild) was such a powerhouse of energy, turning Highclere into a proper hospital in WWI. Further books have followed, with The Earl & the Pharoah and now A Year at Highclere, the most recent.

Highclere Castle Gin is a joint venture with friends in the USA. We worked around the citrus in our Orangery and lavender in the Monks’ Garden to construct an authentic new London Dry gin that reflected the long history of entertaining at Highclere but was also unique in aspects of smoothness and flavour.

After many test versions and some frustration, we were nearly there. Only when we added a small amount of our rolled oats into the botanical process did we achieve the very smooth taste which has won over 200 Gold & Platinum awards. The bottle presented challenges to achieve its now well-known design with the translucent purple/blue colour. Launched in the autumn of 2019, it was too close to the start of Covid in March 2020.

Quickly adapting, we started a series of virtual cocktail parties, telling stories and making cocktails, even using our much-loved Arab pony Phoebe who starred in our virtual party on the east lawns in June 2020, with an online audience of over 80,000.

This project emphasised the need to adapt and move on and try to link up marketing between the different elements of the Estate. The gin produced a meeting in Nicaragua which led to two beautiful Highclere Castle Cigars now sold across the USA, and some Cigar Bars now stock both Highclere Gin (often drunk on the rocks) and the Victorian and Edwardian Highclere Cigar brands.

Our Instagram account began in a small way, but during Covid (like everyone else) we faced a massive loss of customers and business. It became the way forward, communicating all the best of Highclere in pictures and videos. From hilarious beginnings with both Instagram and Facebook Live the wrong way up or a bit shaky, practice and using the new video edit apps has allows us to become our own little production company.

Highclere is a huge responsibility with so much history, but Fiona and I have loved every minute over the last 22 years, even if some months there were some serious bumps in the road (and potential crashes). But persistence, willingness to adapt and think anew has kept us in the game and, we hope, on into the future.