Set in a 13,500-acre estate, Wallington was donated to the National Trust in 1942 by Sir Charles Philips Trevelyan. Today, it is the Trust’s largest working estate
George Lowthian Trevelyan was breakfasting one morning in 1942 with his friends, the Cowens, at their home in Phillimore Gardens, Kensington. Opening a copy of that day’s The Times, ‘…he stood quite still, went white, and was silent,’ recalled Rhoda Cowen. ‘Then he said the oddest thing, I shall always remember it: “My hairbrushes don’t belong to me any more!” ’
That moment of shock, as recorded by biographer Frances Farrer, was understandable. The article George had laid eyes on confirmed that his father, Charles, was donating the family seat of Wallington to the National Trust: lock, stock and pheasant-shooting barrel.
This beautiful Northumberland estate – of rich farms and rough-grass and heather-clad moorland bounded by the river Wansbeck teeming with brown trout and crayfish – dated back a thousand years or more. The house itself, with its 18th-century elegance, had replaced a defensive peel tower, built to protect not only against raiding Scots but
