Getting ready for curtain up on stately home's visitor season

Staff at one of North Yorkshire's finest stately homes are getting ready for visitors again with a delicate spruce up of many of the house's finest historic features.

Conservation experts at Nunnington Hall, on the banks of the River Rye, near Helmsley, are preparing for the house's February opening with a deep clean of the National Trust property – including the painstaking task of cleaning the curtains in the former owner's bedroom.

Nunnington Hall traces its origins back to the thirteenth century and the house changed hands a number of times between leading families until Margaret Fife gave Nunnington Hall and its gardens to the National Trust in 1952.