'A blue-blood background and a drive to disrupt': Lady Violet Manners on the importance of preserving Britain's privately-owned country homes

The biggest fan of HeritageXplore, a digital platform promoting Britain’s privately-owned historic houses, might live in Dallas, Texas. Last April, Elizabeth Pollock went on one of the company’s ‘Luxe’ tours, which promise small groups exclusive access at the country estates. This includes time spent with the houses’ owners. They, not guides, show you around their ancestral piles; you’ll likely dine with them, in black tie, and share Scotch by the fire before you shuffle off to your bedroom, for you are staying overnight. Travel between houses is by chauffeured car and, when the itinerary includes Scotland, private jet or helicopter.

Elizabeth, arriving at Boughton House, in Northamptonshire, realised the experience would have little in common with her previous historic-house visits when she was invited into the family’s own kitchen for tea. ‘You're not going to the visitors centre or café or ticket desk,’ she says. The tour was ‘every dream come true’.

Americans — I too am one — love a British country house. Our introduction to the concept typically comes via popular culture; my first touchpoints were Blur’s 1995 single Country House and Granada Television's Brideshead Revisited, starring Castle Howard. Elizabeth, who now consults with HeritageXplore in growing its presence in the USA, parses our Anglophilia with local pride: ‘Americans love England, especially in Texas, especially in Dallas.’

HeritageXplore, whose founder and CEO is Violet Lindesay-Bethune, Viscountess Garnock, launched in 2024 to leverage this reverence for the UK’s historic country estates and get Americans — and everyone else, including Britons — to visit those that are privately owned. These independent houses, versus ones in the care of the National Trust or English Heritage, are unique for having been kept in the same families for generations. After the Second World War, many opened their doors to paying visitors to offset eyewatering inheritance taxes and maintenance expenses, and many others were demolished when such costs couldn't be met. HeritageXplore, beyond offering the rarified tours, more commonly serves as a marketplace that brings these houses together online for the first time. This allows someone interested in visiting them — perhaps having been to National Trust houses and seeking deeper cuts — to explore the options in a centralised hub and book visits. Before, you’d have been poking around Google Maps and the houses’ own websites — many ‘heritage’ in an unwanted way.

In helping to bring Britain’s heritage tourism into the digital age, Lady Garnock, 32, has drawn on two arguably paradoxical personal resources: a blue-blood background and a drive to disrupt.

Eldest daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, Lady Garnock grew up from age eight in a particularly grand example of the houses on her platform: Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire, the family seat since 1509. Lady Garnock is also Lady Violet Manners; last June, she married William Lindesay-Bethune, Viscount Garnock, an occasion Tatler called ‘a candidate for high-society wedding of the year’. When I ask about this fairy-tale-seeming childhood, Lady Garnock tightropes between acknowledging the privilege of it all and giving voice to the challenges of maintaining a historic house. Yes, she was a little girl living in a literal castle on a hill, and yes, she was once sent up to the roof to pull dead pigeons from a clogged gutter to stop said castle flooding. ‘We were all made aware of just how much upkeep there was from an early age,’ she says of the five Manners siblings.

Growing up sensing the weight of managing Belvoir — and overhearing visiting duchesses’ stories of similar struggles — primed Lady Garnock for championing the modern historic-house custodian, particularly the chatelaine. Following education at Queen Margaret's School in York and Business Studies at University of California, Los Angeles (where she saw Americans’ fascination with British aristocracy), Lady Garnock started a podcast with her mother, to honour the women who keep these houses running for family and country. In touring historic estates across Britain for Duchess, Lady Garnock dreamed up HeritageXplore.

On the platform, each house — 41 at last count — is given a punchy presentation designed to resonate with young people. ‘We’re the generation of marketplaces,’ Lady Garnock tells me. She peppers her conversations with startup-speak. Her natural social-media savvy, meanwhile, meets a key qualification for representing heritage in 2026. In her steady stream of content, the heritage vibes are always immaculate.

Heritage tourism in England contributes £45 billion to the economy annually. The 300-plus independent historic houses, drawing 21 million visitors yearly, are proven attractions, yet half of international tourists don’t leave London to see them. Patricia Yates, CEO of VisitBritain, views Lady Garnock as an ally in encouraging visitors to get out into the countryside. Her work, Patricia tells me, ‘builds a sense of place and community and boosts visits to other local businesses and attractions’. You visit the estate, and you also eat in the local pub.

How are privately owned houses ‘getting on’ today? Lady Garnock says they’re ‘in good nick’, and their owners, who have by necessity become entrepreneurial to generate income, ‘of an ambitious mindset’. The houses’ turns in period dramas like Downton Abbey and The Crown (in which Belvoir stood in for Windsor Castle) have boosted visitor numbers, with Bridgerton, sexually charged and diversely cast, driving Gen Z interest.

Such ‘screen tourism’ notwithstanding, Lady Garnock laments an ‘ongoing siege’ on rural Britain, with the 2025 Budget extending unfriendly policies. The businesses that independent estates contain, like farm shops and cafés, face increased taxation. A perennial frustration is that the private houses must pay VAT on restoration efforts — work totalling £156 million annually. Lady Garnock’s message to the government: ‘It’s important to recognize the value of these places, because the rest of the world does.’

As for the distinction between private houses and those operated by conservation charities, Lady Garnock says ‘it’s not them or us’. She praises the National Trust for having saved many estates from demolition. Still, she believes there’s an unmistakable ‘integrity’ to independent houses, which without institutional restraints can better express their unique character and settings — down to, say, the local jam served in the tearoom. And independents can innovate. Many have, for example, added playgrounds themed on the houses’ histories. ‘You don't often get that kind of ingenuity from the public sector of heritage,’ she says.

For Walter Henry Montagu Douglas Scott, Earl of Dalkeith, future Duke of Buccleuch, having two family seats on HeritageXplore — Boughton House and Drumlanrig Castle — has provided a ‘fresh and innovative way’ to reach new audiences. He points to HeritageXplore’s artist residency programme, which sees an artist create work inspired by a member house; Drumlanrig hosted Chilean painter Sebastián Espejo. In addition to the residencies’ culminating exhibitions, HeritageXplore holds myriad other events at its houses to draw guests: comedy, opera, Burns supper.

That many of Britain's estates have remained intact is largely attributable to male-preference primogeniture which was designed specifically to keep them together, preventing the fragmentation of land and wealth across multiple heirs. The practice has, unsurprisingly, been challenged in recent years and in 2011, leaders of the Commonwealth unanimously agreed that birth order, and not gender, would determine the British Royal Family’s succession line. At the time of writing, peerages can still only be passed down the male line. Asked whether she supports primogeniture, Lady Garnock says if it’s what keeps the houses together, then yes. She adds that she welcomes the chance to create her own home, a project now underway in Fife, with her husband.

While her brother Charles Manners, Marquess of Granby, will inherit Belvoir, Lady Garnock has found in HeritageXplore her way of helping the British country estate keep pace with societal change. She’s convinced spending time in these houses improves one’s mental health, and wants to fund studies on this. I tell her the effect is strong even remotely — I’m a better person during my annual rewatching, from my home in New York City, of Brideshead Revisited — and she lights up.