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and occupy the purpose-built villages like Dersingham – ‘Benefer, Parker, Marrington,
Stratton, Amos’. Nowadays the Big House is open from Christmas until February;
Elizabeth goes there in the springtime when the thoroughbred breeding season is at its
height, and the Queen Mother always goes there with her own house guests at the end of
July. Generally, during the rest of the year, Elizabeth uses Wood Farm at Wolferton
(where Prince John died), a charming two-storey brick and stone farmhouse which has
been renovated. Philip and other members of the family use it for weekends and
shooting-parties and there is a special place built there for shooting lunches.
At 20,000 acres, the Sandringham estate is one of the biggest in Norfolk. There is a
Land Agent, but Philip is in overall control of the estate and particularly the shooting,
although the studs are Elizabeth’s province. Apart from horses, gun-dogs, cattle and
pigs, Elizabeth breeds and races racing-pigeons (one of her father’s birds won the
Dickens Medal, the animal’s Victoria Cross, for its exploits in the Second World War).
There are woods of tall, elegant Corsican and Scots pines and nearer the sea flat lands
retreat towards the sea wall built in 1860; beyond it is rough grass covered by the sea at
high tide and laced with creeks at low tide. The sky is huge over the great stretch of
water called the Wash and to the north the coast of Lincolnshire shimmers like a mirage.
Samphire, a sort of salty sea-asparagus, grows in the mud under water and can be
harvested at low tide as it has been since medieval times. Boiled and eaten with
mayonnaise or hollandaise, it is served as a course on its own. The royal family love it
and samphire from Sandringham was served at the wedding breakfast of the Prince and
Princess of Wales. The retired head-keeper, Montague Christopher, and his wife gather
two harvests of samphire each year to send up to Balmoral and to the Prince of Wales in
London. Once they harvested 30lb for a state banquet given to the President of Mexico.
Philip is particularly fond of hazelnuts from a nutgrove at Appleton, the old house (now
pulled down) where Queen Maud of Norway lived. As the Duke is never there at nutting
time, the keeper gathers them in and buries them, like squirrels do in the wood, but in
hessian bags so that they can breathe, and about a foot down to escape the frosts. They
keep so well that eaten in January they are as good as they were in October. Venison
from the estate – the original fallow deer and now muntjak escaped from Woburn and
roe deer – is sent up to London for the Palace kitchens. Elizabeth likes the country things
– quince jelly from the quince tree at Wood Farm, little baskets of game fowl eggs
presented to her by the keepers. Although Philip is in overall charge on the estate,
Elizabeth notices everything and has the final say in such things as tiles for the reroofing
of the barns. ‘She has a mastery of detail,’ one of her employees said, ‘is very
observant and has an incredibly retentive memory (which the Queen Mother has too), a
trained memory for facts.’
Balmoral is the other place where Elizabeth can fulfil her childhood dream of being
‘married to a farmer and having lots of horses and cows and dogs’. She calls her annual
visit there ‘hibernating’. ‘It’s nice to be able to sleep in the same bed for six weeks,’ she
says. ‘And there is a certain fascination in keeping the place as Queen Victoria had it…’
As one looks up the valley of the Dee from the castle, the view is not so very different