Step back in time...

One thing that we have in abundance in the UK is heritage.

But it comes at a cost.

And that is why we have organisations like English Heritage and The National Trust.

Take Brodsworth Hall near Doncaster for instance.

Brodsworth is what the victorian gentry called "a country house", its not a stately home and the Thellusson family who built it in 1860 did not have impressive titles, but they were rich victorians, having made their "brass" (as we say oop north) in banking and mining, so rich that they bought the Brodsworth estate with a stately pile already on it, but they didn't like it so knocked it down and built their own house on the same spot.

And they lived there for several generations right through to 1988, the amassed family fortune from the industrious Thellussons lasted for just over 100 years until it was all spent, but boy did the descendants have fun spending it in their own ways.

Horse racing and yachting were their vices and the house is packed full of their trophies from both sports, and they spent lots of the family money on their gardens too until finally there was only one old lady left, Mrs Sylvia Grant-Dalton for whom the upkeep of what was by then an old house proved too much. When she died in 1988 the house was in a derelict state and looking at the English heritage photographs of the time its hard to believe that someone could have lived in the ruin.

The house had suffered, in an incredibly ironic turn of fate, from subsidence, caused by the underground mine workings of the original Thessullon family's pits, ceilings were collapsing, the roof was all but gone and the magnificent country house was riddled with damp and rot.

Which is where English Heritage stepped in and started a 15 year restoration project with the admirable aim of not only restoring the building structure, but restoring all of the accumulated possesions of the Thessullon family which Mrs Grant-Dalton had hoarded like a miser in rooms packed full of the sort of junk that a rich family collects over 120 years.

We've visited Brodsworth three times in the last eight or nine years and every time I find it a fascinating place to go. Its unlike our closest stately pile (Harewood, home to the Queens cousin) in that Brodsworth is a home, rather than an array of rooms displaying the family gold and silver, and in that respect it is also matched by Lotherton Hall near Leeds, another victorian country house which has been preserved with the families possesions as if the family still lived there , to the extent where you can see, touch, and read old newspapers left lying around on side tables.

Its in complete contrast to another great Hall that I once visited back in the late eighties, Beninbrough Hall had been handed to English Heritage completely stripped of anything evidence that anyone had ever lived there and in that first year that we visited most of the rooms were completely empty save for a few dusty old portraits hanging on the wall that had been borrowed from The National Portrait Gallery and didn't even relate to Yorkshire let alone the house itself.

The likes of Brodsworth (which has just opened its last phase of work) and Lotherton, are prime examples of how we should preserve our history and present it to our children, both houses have very busy education schedules for their local schools and are so much better at teaching history than sitting in classrooms reading old books on old subjects.