Present Day
Set in the midst of a landscape park, the National Trust presented Calke Abbey as an illustration of the English country house in decline. A massive amount of remedial work but no restoration has been done and interiors are almost as they were found in 1985 so the decay of the building and its interiors has been halted but not reversed. Before the National Trust work of the late 1980s everything had remained untouched since the 1880s.
To the side of the house is a large quadrangle of buildings forming the old stable yard and farm, complete with old carriages and farm implements. The outbuildings incorporate a brewhouse, that was linked to the main house by a tunnel.
The Trust manages the surrounding landscape park with an eye to nature conservation. It contains such features as a walled garden, with a flower garden and a former physic garden, now managed as a kitchen garden.
Some years after Calke was handed over to the National Trust to settle death duties, an heir was discovered: Andrew Johnson, a distant cousin of the Harpur family. Johnson was a wealthy resident of Vermont and the owner of important stands of timber and of a lumber business, though the popular press in Britain referred to him as a "lumberjack". Johnson was given the use of an apartment in the Abbey, which he and his family have used on occasional visits.
The limestone quarries on the estate near Ticknall are the end point of the railway that took limestone to the Ashby Canal at Willesley basin and one of the tunnels can be seen restored and running under the drive. See Ashby Canal and Ticknall wiki entry for details. It closed in 1915.
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