Welbeck

The collection behind the courtyard

The Portland Collection at the Harley Gallery is free to get into, open every day of the week, and holds a Michelangelo, a handful of George Stubbs horse studies, and the pearl earring King Charles I wore to his own execution in 1649.

It's not what you expect at the end of a drive through a Nottinghamshire estate. The gallery opened in 2016 to house the Cavendish-Bentinck family's collection, one of the largest aristocratic art holdings in Britain, in a courtyard with a children's Creative Space, a shop and the Harley Café, where jackdaws work the water feature.

Artisan food and estate beer

Welbeck Farm Shop, on the A60 fifteen minutes from the A1 and M1, is open daily until 5pm (4pm Sundays). Two-thirds of what it sells is grown or made on the estate — rare-breed meat cured in-house, raw milk that also goes into Stichelton, the blue cheese made just up the road, and a resident chocolatier, Ottar Chocolate. It won UK Large Farm Shop and Farm Butcher of the Year in 2024. Round the corner, in the former fire stables, is the School of Artisan Food, the UK's first, founded in 2009 by William and Alison Swan Parente after their own bakehouse couldn't find enough trained bakers — courses run from half a day to four weeks, in bread, cheesemaking, brewing and foraging.

The Welbeck Abbey Brewery, founded in 2011 by Claire Monk, brews with the estate's own spring water and yeast strain, turning out more than 17,000 pints a week. Tours are £15, two pints and an hour included, ending with a drink alongside the brewer.

A pub and a path to the crags

The nearest pub is the Greendale Oak, in Cuckney, which pours Welbeck Abbey's beers, some brewed for nobody else. Reviews disagree about almost everything, calling it anything from "a proper country pub that is laid-back, full of character and big on flavour" to not dog friendly and the staff scripted.

Paths lead from the gallery car park into the limestone gorge at Creswell Crags, used by people for 43,000 years, home to Europe's northernmost cave art, a 2.5-mile loop of about an hour.

The burrowing duke and a village after Domesday

None of this explains the tunnels. The 5th Duke of Portland, who took over in the 1850s, disliked being seen and had at least a dozen miles dug under the grounds, linking the house to the riding school. Underneath he built a 250-foot library and a 160-foot great hall, reached by a hydraulic lift for twenty guests and painted on the ceiling like a sunset, used by most accounts only for roller-skating, alone. He's generally agreed to be the model for Badger in The Wind in the Willows.

Welbeck has no entry in the Domesday Book: it didn't exist yet, growing up around the Abbey founded in 1153. It had 31 residents at the last count, an estate with a village attached, some 15,000 acres five miles from Worksop off the A60. A station at Creswell sits on the Robin Hood Line, and the 209 bus stops at Cuckney.

Back to the courtyard

Come back to the gallery café at the end of it and the same water feature will still have jackdaws working the edges of it, unbothered by dukes, tunnels, or pearl earrings that once belonged to a king who lost his head.