Does the Duke of Devonshire really want to be my friend – or is he just after my bank details?

The Chatsworth estate, Derby-shire. I am overwhelmed by marketing literature. I am prostrate. I am weeping.

I am staying in one of the Duke of Devonshire’s barns, renovated into a one-bedroom ‘cottage’ with no interior doors. Maybe it was home to a horse once, maybe not; I do not know. I am a short walk from the Chatsworth Estate Farm Shop and Café, a longer walk from a branch of the Devonshire Arms, and 20 minutes from the Cavendish Restaurant, which is definitely in the stables at Chatsworth. (You probably want me to say something about Chatsworth House. OK. It is almost as ugly as Blenheim Palace.) I know this because the cottage is full of marketing literature with photographs of the duke — ‘Peregrine’ or ‘Stoker’ — and his wife ‘Amanda’ (no recorded nickname), smiling at me with papery and covetous malice. ‘We’re delighted you’re here,’ says one. ‘The Best of Friends,’ says another, with a direct debit form on the back. This is the marketing strategy of Chatsworth, and it is the most duplicitous and effective I have ever known: give us your money and we will be friends with you. Really? In a planet without inheritance tax the leaflet would surely say: ‘Peregrine, release the hounds. [And get the shot-gun for the more persistent ones.]’

Chippy, you may say. Well, yes. The Devonshires are a marvel of fortune and industry. Their estate is almost anti-Baroque in its efficiency and gloss, a flurry of teal doors on green hills; it is an antithesis of what we have learnt to consider poshness, which is stupid men (from banging heads on small medieval doorways and marrying chorus girls?) and women wandering around with dead animals in their hair saying ‘Call me Amanda.