Just an ordinary family – but with a spectacular castle for a home

THE boys are larking about in the kitchen.

“Muuum, can we cut Richard’s hair off?”

says one as he ruffles his younger brother’s hair.

Another, home from university, is rummaging about in the cupboards looking for lunch. “Can I have beans on toast?” His mother can’t resist taking control of the saucepan and stirs as she talks.

The kitchen is littered with the paraphernalia of family life. There are photographs of the children – four boys and a girl – on holiday. There’s a poster from the Kaiser Chiefs’ concert at Elland Road in Leeds and tickets from concerts they have been to. One of the fridge magnets says: “My husband says he’ll leave if I go shopping one more time. Lordy how I’ll miss that man.”

The beans on toast-eater, affectionately known as Lurch, wants a second tin of beans.

“I’m hungry, I’ve been working in the garden,” he says.

“They’re very normal children,”

says mum, who happens to be Lady Emma Ingilby, as she hands me a cup of coffee. We are standing next to the Aga in the large family kitchen, complete with its huge pine table and wallmounted flat screen TV. The kitchen lies at the heart of Ripley Castle.

Here, the Ingilby family do endeavour to lead a normal family life – as normal as it can be when you live in a castle set in acres of grounds, with its own lake and deer park, and visited by 70,000 tourists every year.

It is 700 years since the family became keepers of the original castle in 1309 and this is the 26th generation of Ingilbys to live in it, a record only a handful of other stately homes in the country can match.

These ancient walls hold stories of kings and queens, civil war, plagues and secrets hidden behind the panelling.

The Ingilbys were connected with nine of the 11 main Gunpowder Plot conspirators, and one of the family, a staunch Royalist, even held Oliver Cromwell hostage at gunpoint in the castle library.

“Our 700th anniversary is a big deal,” says Lady Ingilby.

“We may not be the biggest house in Yorkshire, but we’ve been here longer than the Howards have been at Castle Howard. It’s a huge achievement.”

Lady Ingilby met Sir Thomas at a dinner party when she was an 18-year-old student, but she knew him as just plain Tom and had no idea of his heritage. The daughter of a comprehensive school teacher, when she was first invited back to Tom’s mother’s home, she arrived in the dark. It wasn’t until next morning, when she opened the shutters in her bedroom, that she saw the castle courtyard and grounds. “I got home and said to my mother, ‘He’s not just Tom Ingilby’. We had to look him up in Debrett’s,”

she said.

One of the things that had attracted Sir Thomas to Lady Ingilby was her infamous party trick – cracking two walnuts down the front of her dungarees without using her hands. “I got his attention. I got everyone’s attention,” she said.

She came across as a girl with a can-do attitude, who could turn her hand to anything – essential qualifications for running a stately home.

It didn’t take her long to prove herself. “When you marry a stately home, there is no training. You have to be pretty well everything, from interior designer to historian, cook and flower arranger. You try anything once.”

While pregnant with her second son, she welcomed guests who had arrived at the castle for a clay pigeon shoot in the morning, gave birth a few hours later and then popped back to serve them tea. “I was in charge of the catering,” she explained.

She maintains that a stapler and glue gun are a stately wife’s best friends. “There is nothing they can’t do,” she says.

She had to climb on scaffolding when heavily pregnant to repair a fallen piece of ceiling plaster in the main hall. “I made a mould with warm plasticine, filled it with plaster of Paris and stuck it up again. It saved us thousands.”

When they moved into the castle, a year after they married, the couple shared the family accommodation with Sir Thomas’ mother. They were hardly living in the lap of luxury. “We were in one bedroom with the baby in a cot beside us, and we shared this kitchen. Everything else needed doing up. It hadn’t been lived in for a long time.

It was cold, and there was all the electrics to do. The floor in our bedroom was so unsafe we had to put steel girders in.”

Doing up the castle was a huge task. “It was the scale of it. Any mistake you make in a big room is a big mistake. If you get it wrong, it is very expensive.”

They put up a brick wall to separate the family accommodation from the public area. Lady Ingilby gives her address as The Flat, Ripley Castle, even though there are 11 bedrooms, spread over three floors, in the family apartment. “I’m the only person I know who has an Aga in a first-floor flat.

My little goddaughter once said to me: ‘Are you living in a flat until you get somewhere nice to live?’”

The dining room is small.

“But I am so lucky,” said Lady Ingilby. “If we have more than eight to ten for dinner, I have the use of five other dining rooms. None of us gets blase about where we live.”

Bringing up a family here has been a challenge. “People don’t realise, you can’t leave your baby out in a pram in the garden in summer.” All the children wore whistles round their necks when they were small. They also carried walkie talkies when they went off building dens in the grounds. “They had to be able to swim,” said Lady Ingilby.

“And you have got to be slightly sensitive. We never had any up-to-date pictures of them on show. Some of them work in the tea rooms, but we don’t put their full names on their badges.”

The couple had to put a special glass cover on a balconied circular skylight which looks down from their apartment to a floor open to the public below. “The children used to throw toys down at people. Once, one of the boys climbed over to get his car and the attendants were down below with blankets trying to catch him. Now, the boys look down at the guests’ cleavages. Naughty,” she laughed.

The children, who now range from 14 to 23, bring lots of friends to stay. “That’s the problem with living in a castle, people think you have lots of room. Once, we had 38 staying.”

One day, when he’s ready, their eldest son will take over the family business, which now includes a hotel, conference and wedding venue, with a £3.5m turnover. When Sir Thomas and Lady Ingilby started out, the castle was only open for occasional weekends and bank holidays and had a staff of 17, most part-time. Today, they employ 120 full-time staff.

Other costs are high. One recent gas bill was £33,500 for a quarter, and it will take about £250,000 just to dredge the lake. “I am a bit defeated by the lake. No job is cheap here.

It’s an old property and very expensive to maintain,” said Lady Ingilby.

She and her husband have just celebrated their silver wedding anniversary with champagne and blinis for about 80 friends and family.

They sent text invitations saying: “Bugger the recession.

We’re celebrating.”