THE DRAWING ROOM at Eastnor Castle near Wales, which brings in nearly $5 million each year from events and other activities.  Few epigrams about maintaining a country estate ring as true as one uttered by a member of Hollywood royalty now living in the South of France. "It takes a lot of money to lead a simple life," remarked Johnny Depp. These days the simple life is perhaps priciest in Great Britain, where, unlike the sage actor, most owners of stately homes made their money the old-fashioned way: They inherited it. Moats, turrets and drawbridges can be splendid to behold, but if your home is truly your castle, the upkeep can be overwhelming. Imagine the cost of restoring hundreds of rotted oak beams and replacing stonework on castellated walls four feet thick. Or replicating 12-ton iron gates and mending roofs measured in acres, not to mention heating a great hall with ceilings three stories high. No wonder many aristocrats can no longer mind their manors and have either put them on the market or donated them to the National Trust.  Some of England's peers have found more creative solutions. They not only inhabit their ancestral piles, but run them as businesses too, dangling their glittery goods like fishing lures to attract much-needed cash. "In the United States, we tend to have a romantic view of owning a great British estate," says Tom Savage, the director of museum affairs at Winterthur, the 175-room Delaware estate of the late chemical heir Henry Francis du Pont, which houses the foremost collection of American furniture and decorative objects. "But often the veil falls when you see inheritors to whom collecting is not a choice but an encumbering obligation: Out of economic necessity, they're doing everything in their power to hold on to what they've got."  For more than 20 years, Savage has been hooking up connoisseurs of the decorative arts with the owners of England's great estates, where most of the finest antiques are to be found. He regularly takes groups of 12 to 16 Americans on private tours of British homes and country houses, even having them stay (as paying guests) for a night or two. Not in the old laundry or the converted stables, but in the mansion itself while the owners look on, content in the knowledge that the visiting Yank is helping to keep their homestead humming.  "It's always satisfying to crack a previously uncracked house," Savage says, referring to those yet unexplored by antiquities hunters. "I love having this privileged view of a lifestyle that is probably not sustainable. I always seem to walk into the last days of Camelot." After the party is over, the butlers and footmen tend to vanish and the hosts repair to the kitchen for a midnight snack. "You can find them by the kitchen telly eating Weetabix," Savage says. "The illusion is over."  Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh regularly regale guests with their colorful family history.  "Castle creepers" is what the British sometimes call tourists who poke around the contents of a stately home. Savage prefers to think of the well-heeled Colonials he shepherds around less as creepers than house partiers. "The English entertain on a grand scale, with a full complement of servants," he says. "Often the owner of the house or garden greets the group, shows them around and joins them for a meal on heirloom Wedgwood. The whole point of the trip is to be a participant."  For their money, the participants get a cultural education as well as access and authenticity. "This is serious art history that just happens to be taught over quail eggs and cocktails," Savage notes. The aristocrats with whom his guests hobnob are the Real McCoy—not ones who have bought their titles on the Internet to fulfill a craving for upper-class respectability.  "These are all hardworking and diligent property owners with a sense of duty and commitment toward conserving their estates for future generations," says the Virginia-born Savage, an unapologetic royalist. "One misstep, an inappropriate marriage, or worse—an expensive divorce—can do immense damage to a place that a family has looked after responsibly for hundreds of years." The estate owners tend to welcome Savage's house partiers as they would old and dear friends. "They immediately put everyone at ease," he says. Among his favorite private homes are Ugbrooke House, Castle Hill, Frampton Court and Eastnor Castle. "They're all very different," he says. "Each has its own story of survival."  NEAR AND FAR | Setting the table for supper at Ugbrooke House  Canapés in one hand, flutes of champagne in the other, the house partiers pass in hushed awe before the family portraits in this superbly maintained Tudor mansion. Redolent in diamonds and lace and a silk fishtail skirt, Lady Clifford—everyone calls her Clarissa—motions toward the saturnine figure in the painting at the top of the staircase. The figure has a long scruffy beard and a faraway look in his eye, not unlike that given by a dead mackerel on a fishmonger's slab. "The chap with the beard is William, the 10th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh," she announces. "We all know him as Silly Willie."  In this corner of Devon, where many families go back centuries, people talk of their long-dead ancestors as if they expect them to walk in the door any minute. There's little chance of running into the wildly eccentric Silly Willie, who died in 1943 at age 85 after winning fame as the founder of the Mystic Evolution Society. (Its credo: "We live in the age of perfect government.") "Silly Willie was a farmer in New Zealand," Lady Clifford says. "His property was so overrun with rabbits that he decided to make his fortune by canning them."  Ugbrooke House (boasts 3,000 acres of grounds.  "Did he make a living at it?" a house partier inquires.  "Hardly," she says. "Silly Willie knew nothing about canning, and after he had killed half a dozen people with ptomaine poisoning, his cousins suggested it was time to move on."  Lady Clifford, the second wife of the family's 14th lord, moved into Ugbrooke 17 years ago. Nestled in peaceful parklands landscaped by Lancelot "Capability" Brown, the estate boasts 3,000 acres of grounds, including dozens of tenant houses, herds of sheep and cattle, an orangery and a Catholic chapel consecrated in 1671. The house, remodeled in the 1760s by the great Robert Adam, experienced damaging indignities during World War II, after which it became a grain store.  In 1957, Hugh, the 13th lord, arrived with his family from Australia and undertook what his son, Tom, the current Lord Clifford, calls "the massive task of making the house habitable." What Lord Clifford No. 13 merely made habitable, the current Lady Clifford, a London decorator, brought back to life. "Sweetheart," she told her husband, "you could transform this house without spending a bean on it." Which she did, by repositioning furniture and plundering the attic for lost treasures. (For several beans, she restored the interiors.)  RUN OF THE HOUSE | Saskia (left) and Sophie help in the tea room on Ugbrooke's open days.  The treasures range from tapestries given to Thomas, the first Lord Clifford, by Cosimo de' Medici to a sporting rifle used by Lewis, the ninth Lord, who fought with Custer at Yellowstone River. One of the bigger finds was Adam's architectural plan, commissioned by Hugh, the fourth Lord Clifford. "The fourth lord may have been a pain in the butt as a client," notes Lady Clifford.  Stored in the staircase was the secret royal pardon that Charles II issued to the original Lord Clifford. The document granted immunity from the bitter recriminations to Catholicism that cost others their heads. More than 300 years later, Lord Hugh Clifford was cited for speeding and tried to test the validity of the pardon in traffic court. "It didn't go at all well," reports Lady Clifford. His Lordship was fined £50.  These days the Cliffords help run the estate through Ugbrooke Enterprises. They hire out the venue for receptions and corporate retreats. Of all their entrepreneurial ventures, Lady Clifford says she's keenest on Savage's overnight tours. She welcomes the guests with genuine warmth, immediately putting everyone at ease. "Clarissa knows what American visitors expect," Savage observes. "The baths are huge, the linens superb."  The walls of the drawing room at Ugbrooke House are covered with 17th-century portraits.  To differentiate the numerous bedrooms, some have been named for notable lodgers of the distant past. The Duchess of Norfolk's Room is opulently decorated with a carved four-poster bed and the needlework of Mary, the ninth Duchess of Norfolk, whose sister Elizabeth married the third Lord Clifford. The Cardinal's Room has been outfitted with a 19th-century prelate's personal effects, but not the 19th-century prelate. (He's buried in Rome.)  In the 19th century, Ugbrooke was renowned for its lavish theatrical parties. "Entertainment is what this house was designed for," Lady Clifford says. "Today, entertainment washes its face." At a drawing-room soiree, Lord Clifford bellies up to a table and pours glasses of wine from his New Zealand vineyard. "This vintage of Riesling is superior to any produced in Germany," he tells the revelers. "You're all welcome to buy a case." Lady Clifford mingles beneath a Jacob Huysmans oil of Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II. "I'm wearing Catherine of Braganza's earrings," she says.  For Lady Clifford, the best thing about being chatelaine of Ugbrooke may be that she literally is the hostess with the mostest. Atop the grand piano is a photo of her wearing the Clifford tiara. Then again, she doesn't take her status all that seriously: Beside her photo is one of Clover—the clan's late, lamented lurcher—crowned by the same jeweled coronet.  Lord and Lady Arran refer to monetizing access to their home as "a positive route forward."  The Earl of Arran has a reservation or two about hosting guests as a revenue-raising scheme, but he's a good sport about it and tries to enjoy the role. As the house partiers are ushered into his presence, he emits a curious high cry which, to borrow a phrase from P.G. Wodehouse, he may have picked up from some wild duck of his acquaintance.  "Do you like white ladies?" he asks one of the guests, a New Orleans gynecologist named Quinn Peeper.  "I beg your pardon," the startled Peeper says.  "A white lady, the drink," says the earl, mischievously. "Gin, Cointreau and lime juice. It's delightful."  Slim and splendidly erect, Lord Arran pairs his deep-blue blazer and white pocket square with mango-colored trousers. A Conservative government minister for nearly a decade, he was one of the last hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords.  He and the countess—better known as Tommy and Nell—live in the Palladian House, a Georgian-style mansion perched on a gently rolling slope that overlooks Castle Hill estate, 5,500 acres of ornate gardens, park woodlands and pastures in North Devon. "I'm fundamentally a farmer," Lady Arran says, referring to the estate's dairy herd of British Friesians. "People have said such marvelous things about the grounds," adds Lord Arran. "I can hardly believe they were sober."  ROYALTY SLEPT (AND SLEEPS) HERE | Portraits of royal ancestors preside over the drawing room.  Lady Arran descends from the House of Fortescue, which is said to date from William the Conqueror. She grew up in the mansion, a replica of the original house built in 1730 by Hugh Fortescue, the 14th Baron Clinton and first Baron Fortescue of Castle Hill.  "In the 1930s, a huge fire gutted the center block of Palladian House," she says. "My grandparents, the fifth Earl Fortescue and his wife, rebuilt it immediately." The park and gardens have been under restoration pretty much ever since. "The estate is a huge responsibility," says the indefatigable Lady Arran. "We tinker away around the edges, doing our best."  The couple has embraced diversification as what Lady Arran calls a "positive route forward." Castle Hill now hosts everything from seasonal shooting parties to the National Sheep Dog Trials. This summer a concert by the English tenor Russell Watson was staged on the cow pasture. Part of the profits were plowed into the property.  Rollo Clifford with his wife, Janie.  It was Lady Arran's idea to redecorate the entire west wing of Palladian House and turn it into a hitching post for house partiers, concerts and weddings. When her oldest daughter, Lady Laura Melissa Fortescue-Gore, married Major James Anthony L'Etang Duckworth-Chad, both Princes William and Harry were guests.  In Britain, the chief obligations of the titled are to survive inheritance taxes, hang on to the family silver and provide an heir. Lady Arran has jumped through all these hoops, alongside doing her part for charity. Among other things, she is patron of the Royal Devon Yeomanry, vice chairman of the governors at West Buckland School, president of the Calvert Trust Exmoor, patron of the Forget-Me-Not Trust and member of the Prince of Wales' Council.  Lady Arran clearly loves to conduct tours and expound on her heritage. When Savage's rolling house party makes a pit stop, she deconstructs the rather stolid portrait of the wife of Matthew, the second Baron Fortescue of Castle Hill. "Lady Fortescue apparently had nothing else to do but sit on her bottom and get painted," says Lady Arran. As if on cue, her rascally husband strides in from his study and asks, "Is everyone sufficiently inebriated?"  MANSION FOR HIRE | Frampton Court, a mix of Baroque and Palladian styles, "is like a big open mouth you have to feed," says Rollo Clifford with his wife, Janie.  Frampton Court Estate has a libidinous history. Jane Clifford was reputedly born in the stone and timber-framed manor some 860 years ago. A romantic entanglement with Henry II prompted him to call her his "rose of the world," hence the handle "Fair Rosamund." According to legend, Henry's jealous queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, offered his mistress the murderous alternative of a dagger or a cup of poisoned wine. "Jane managed to dodge the choice," says Rollo Clifford as he leads Savage's party past a hedge of Rosa Mundi, the red-and-white striped rose named for her. "She died in a nunnery."  Rollo was born in the manor, too, though not in the tiny, oak-paneled bedroom known as Rosamund's Bower. In 1963, his family moved from the quirky 13th-century manor to Frampton Court, the 18th-century mansion just across the village green. Twenty years later he moved back into the manor with his wife and four children.  THE HELP | Marion Kemp, a keen hunting lady from the village, helps serve lunch at Frampton Court.  The estate now comprises 1,500 acres of meadows, woodlands and lakes harboring a profusion of wildfowl and 17 species of dragonfly, the most bountiful in all of Gloucestershire. "We're based on farming here," Rollo says, "and at the mercy of the ups and downs of the agricultural world."  Meanwhile, the cost of preservation goes only in one direction: up. Historic structures need regular attention, and in England even basic work must be carried out to a high standard. "You really need a bank or an oil well in the family, and we've got neither," says Rollo. "This estate is like a big open mouth that you have to feed with money."  In 2001, a full-scale restoration of the 16th-century wool barn (the frame is homegrown oak; the roof, Cotswold stone tile) cost £500,000, or more than $800,000. With the aid of generous grants, the building was faithfully patched up. "The government helped out with a sting in its tail," allows Rollo's oldest daughter, Jessie. "We had to open the place to the public."  Frampton Court mansion, unoccupied by the family since the death of Rollo's mother, Henriette, became the tourist centerpiece. Built for a Bristol customs official as a sort of bachelor pad, the house is a fabulous fusion of baroque and Palladian architectural styles, its orangery capped by a parapet edged with pinnacles and battlements. "It's terribly grand," sighs Jessie, a 33-year-old milliner who keeps a studio on the ground floor and lives in the nearby village. "And everything else on the estate isn't so terribly grand."  The 18th-century orangery plays host to families and friends and "discerning holiday-makers seeking elegance and an idyllic setting," according to the property's website.  "We pay a small fortune just to keep the house warm, and it's never warm," she says. "The reality is that we're just trying to keep on top of the running costs." Jessie is saying this while she, her husband and a team of caterers in starched uniforms serve lunch to Savage and his house partiers. "Whoever is in charge on the estate is just a temporary custodian," she says with a hint of resignation.  There doesn't seem to be much chance that Jessie will ever be awarded custody. By the feudal principle of primogeniture, she and her two sisters have been relegated to the bottom of the stately pile, below their kid brother, Peter. Their father, Rollo, was the second of three sons. His older brother, David, apparently disinherited himself. "David is a bohemian musician," Rollo says. "He didn't want anything to do with Frampton."  Jessie does regard having lived at Frampton as a heavy privilege. "With the weight of eight centuries of history on your shoulders, the concern is cocking it all up."  U.K. GOTHIC | The owners of Eastnor Castle, James and Lucy Hervey-Bathurst, finance the upkeep on their stately home by hosting weddings and festivals.  A gentleman who shoots a springbok antelope faces the same dilemma as a gentleman who shoots his mother-in-law: What do you do with the body? James Hervey-Bathurst suggests that you stuff the antelope. But he hedges on the disposition of the dispatched in-law. Hervey-Bathurst is the owner of Eastnor Castle, a stone-clad family fortress set on 5,000 acres in the Welsh Marches on the western flanks of Malvern Hills. On this particular afternoon in the Great Hall, a stuffed lion (actually, a half-lion) grazes in a display case while Savage's party of house-hunters lolls about on well-stuffed sofas.  The room—a veritable taxidermy hall of fame that measures 55 feet high, 60 in length and 30 wide—is one of nearly 100 in a Norman Revival citadel that has been alternately lauded as one of the finest examples of 19th-century historicism and ridiculed as mock-medievalism.  Eastnor Castle was built between 1812 and 1820, for the second Baron Somers, by Sir Robert Smirke, the architect of the British Museum. It is most celebrated for the interior decoration by Augustus Pugin, carried out two years after he remodeled the House of Lords in the same neo-Gothic style.  The drawing room is his most complete room outside the Palace of Westminster. Hervey-Bathurst's mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of the sixth baron. "After the war, she and my father contemplated dynamiting the house," he says, "but they gave up the idea when told the cost." During the 1950s, the couple retreated to the more livable rooms on the south side that had once housed the servants. "That part of the house still constitutes the family apartments," Hervey-Bathurst says.  When he inherited Eastnor in 1986, much of the castle had been uninhabited for decades and was in a state of daunting disrepair. Hervey-Bathurst and his first wife, Sarah, dedicated themselves to turning the dilapidated landmark into a commercial enterprise. They refurbished and extended central heating, restored six bathrooms and turned the Great Hall into the kind of drawing room favored by an Edwardian house party.  A red bedroom at Eastnor  The refurbished guest bedrooms include the chamber—hung with 18th-century hand-painted Chinese wallpaper—where Queen Mary (Queen Elizabeth II's grandmother) slept on a visit in 1937. "Her Royal Highness didn't take a fancy to anything in our collection," Hervey-Bathurst tells the couple Savage has picked to occupy the chamber for the night, "so it remained intact when she left."  To finance this vast chunk of stately history, Hervey-Bathurst and his second wife, Lucy, hire out the castle for events ranging from weddings in the Pugin Room to the Big Chill music festival in the 300-acre deer park. "Eastnor easily could have been abandoned by the family or repurposed for institutional use," Savage says. "Instead, James adapted the house for nuptials and light corporate functions and, of course, the more intimate house parties—when it really comes to life."  WELSH WONDERLAND | Eastnor's Front of House Manager, Ben Chapman  Today, the estate brings in just under $5 million a year. "The money covers the running costs, but not the repair costs," says Hervey-Bathurst, who until recently represented British country-house owners as president of the Historic Houses Association. "A major repair project wipes out the profits." The strain of running a castle at least partly accounted for his divorce from his first wife. In a very public split that echoed "Lady Chatterley's Lover," the viscount's daughter reportedly dumped Hervey-Bathurst and ran off with a gamekeeper from her father's Yorkshire estate.  "She wanted a smaller place," he says.  The Henry Francis du Pont Collectors Circle was founded in 1984 by Winterthur Museum donors with a strong interest in antiques and a commitment to preserving Winterthur's reputation as the preeminent institution for the study of American decorative arts. Benefits of being a patron include entrée into public and private collections and travel opportunities in the U.S. and abroad. Future itineraries include Boston, Tuscany and, in June 2012, England as the private houseguests of the Earls of Bradford at Westin Park. Cost varies; past tours range from $5,000 to $10,000. For information call 302-888-4878 or email mthurlow@winterthur.org.
If you are to the manor born, you can find the cost of maintaining the family castle downright ignoble. As a result, some owners of British estates are opening their doors to lucrative private tours—and even sleepovers—for history buffs and antiques connoisseurs.