Although it feels more like winter at the moment, spring cleaning is about to start. There is always some competition between the office, who want to take bookings, and the housekeeping side, who want uninterrupted possession to ensure our guests find a clean house, but a compromise is usually reached in February, our low season.

Over the years, we have invested in more and more new equipment and cleaning products, although for certain jobs, elbow grease, such as polishing, is still the best. We have a scaffold tower for high-level dusting and cleaning picture frames and vacuuming tapestries, and a selection of brushes, feather dusters and chemicals for marble, wood, enamel and rugs. We are more limited now on what we can use to deal with moths and beetles, but there is nothing better than the smell of traditional beeswax polish on the woodwork.

We refer to the National Trust Manual of Housekeeping which is a thesaurus of useful information, though we are not always able to follow its advice to the letter.  We just don’t have time.

I love coming into a newly-cleaned room. It smells quite different. My only worry is that Rosemary, our housekeeper, and her team will find some terrible hidden problem when they get down to business. We are still waiting for the tapestry they said needed repair to come back after nearly two years away. What will they find this year?                     JH-B   29th January 2010

One happy couple who started their newly married life together this New Year are Bianca and Baz. They had chosen to get married on 31 December 2009 and we were delighted when they selected Eastnor Castle as their romantic wedding venue.

All wedding days are special but theirs was perhaps one of the most special and stunning you could imagine. The wedding ceremony was held in the Eastnor church of St John The Baptist with a guard of honour provided by the Royal Marines and the wedding rings were delivered in flight down the aisle by a beautiful owl. After the ceremony the happy couple and their guests proceeded to the Castle where they enjoyed their wedding breakfast in the sumptuous surroundings of the Great Hall. 

Share in their wedding joy and watch their Eastnor Castle wedding video below on YouTube - it’s stunning!

As we write this post, New Year’s Eve 2010 is still available at Eastnor Castle. So if you would like an unforgettable, romantic wedding on one of the most special days of the year, please speak to Becky Johnson our Wedding Co-ordinator on 01531 633160.

We are not in the coldest area of the UK, but it is quite cold enough here at the moment. A blanket of snow covers the roofs except where our insulation is not up to standard, and the lake is frozen over. Otherwise, it is business as usual.

My grandfather installed most of the central heating in 1932, but it was only put on for special occasions when I was a child. Instead, we had wood fires, wood burning stoves, imported from Denmark, and an AGA in the kitchen. There were old ceramic hot water bottles and a strange caged light bulb to warm the beds, each hazardous in its own right if not removed in time by unsuspecting visitors. We dressed in warmer clothes then, shut doors and excluded draughts with black tape etc wherever possible. In due course, my parents installed a straw-burning boiler, which had a voracious appetite for bales, but did a good job and saved large oil bills..

In the big freeze of 1963, my father drove a Land Rover, rather tentatively, on the frozen lake. As the snow thawed, we all went onto the roofs to shovel the snow out of the valley gutters so the melted snow could run uninterrupted to the drains. The wrong sort of snow, familiar to recent users of Eurostar services, also blew through the gaps in the slates to lie on the ceilings below. It had to be shovelled out before it melted and came down into the rooms below.

Now, we have extended the central heating and installed new and more efficient boilers. Most of the roofs are insulated and the wood fires still help, although their effect is more cosmetic.
But when the thaw comes, we will still have to shovel the snow from the valley gutters, but in the meantime our guests feel snug and warm.            JH-B    8th January 2010