Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire-Encircled by the Malvern Hills and surrounded by a famous arboretum and lake, this fairytale castle is as dramatic inside as it is outside.

Everyone is struck by the atmosphere. The vitality of a young family brings the past to life and the sense of warmth and optimism is tangible. Eastnor, however grand, is a home.

Sleeping for the past fifty years, the Castle has undergone a triumphant renaissance - 'looking better than it probably ever has', wrote Country Life in 1993.

Hidden away in attics and cellars since the war, many of the castle's treasures are now revealed for the first time - early Italian Fine Art, 17th century Venetian furniture and Flemish tapestries, Mediaeval armour and paintings by Van Dyck, Reynolds, Romney and Watts, photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron.

The Princely and Imposing pile, as it was described in 1812 when it was being built to pitch the owner into the aristocracy, remains the home of his descendants. The castle contains letters, diaries, clothes and furnishings accumulated over two hundred years belonging to friends and relations who include Horace Walpole, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Watts, Julia Margaret Cameron and Virginia Woolf.