Some things are exactly what you would expect to find in the Queen’s drawing room — photographs of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren jostling for space on the Bechstein grand piano; and a Commonwealth souvenir, like the wagga wagga stick from New South Wales.
Then there’s a shelf of well-thumbed Agatha Christie thrillers tucked away above a row of earnest history books; a much-loved, if moth-eaten sofa; and a nice watercolour by the Prince of Wales.
You can certainly spot the Prince’s personal touch as you wander through the gardens, too.
However, as you start to take a closer look at this royal residence, things soon start to diverge from the usual royal pattern.
The only portrait of the Queen herself is an understated, one might almost say casual, one.
There is furniture carved out of wood plucked from a bog. And the photos in one of the main rooms in the house represent a rogues’ gallery of our times: Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, the Rev Ian Paisley, Tony Blair among them.
Hillsborough Castle, in Northern Ireland has homed the Secretary of State for NI since the 1970s, with many of them falling in love with the vast royal property
This is not only the Windsors’ least well-known residence, but also one of the most unusual (it is certainly the only one with a live-in politician in residence).
Now, following the completion of five years of restoration work, Hillsborough Castle has seldom looked quite as spectacular.
This week, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall came to give the final seal of royal approval to the £24 million renovations, an operation which will be offset by opening the house and grounds to the paying public for the first time. And the Mail has just been given an exclusive preview.
Hillsborough Castle has been the seat of royal power in Northern Ireland for almost a century. Yet, until now, you either had to be an invited guest or part of a pre-arranged group to set foot in this place with a turbulent past.
From the partition of the island of Ireland in the Twenties up until the early Seventies, this was the home of the Governor of Northern Ireland, when the Royal Family were not in residence.
Following Ulster’s descent into sectarian violence, that post was abolished and replaced by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
We have been through 20 of those since then, all of them given the run of this honey-coloured 18th-century pile when the Queen and her family have not been in residence.
The running of Hillsborough has been handed over to Historic Royal Palaces, the charitable body which runs self-funding royal premises such as Hampton Court, the Tower of London and Kensington Palace
The politicians have certainly enjoyed the royal trappings when the landlords have been absent. Labour’s Mo Mowlam — Northern Ireland Secretary at the time of the Good Friday Agreement — adored the place so much that she is still here; it was her final wish that some of her ashes should be scattered in the grounds.
Her successor, Peter Mandelson, loved his Hillsborough years, too, and turned his hand to a spot of interior design. Another devoted tenant was the Conservatives’ Tom King. The boat on the lake is still named after him.
Yet, throughout it all, this has always been first and foremost a royal home. There is no mistaking the real masters of the house, not least because the front door is called ‘The State Entrance’. Another clue: it leads through to the ‘Throne Room’.
And now it all feels more royal —and yet more homely — than ever following a change of management. It was David Cameron’s first Northern Irish Secretary, Owen Paterson, who concluded that Hillsborough Castle should be taken out of the hands of civil servants and entrusted to royal experts.
As a result, Hillsborough has been handed over to Historic Royal Palaces, the charitable body which runs self-funding royal premises such as Hampton Court, the Tower of London and Kensington Palace (though not Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, which are in full-time royal control).
Some things are exactly what you would expect to find in the Queen’s drawing room, including photographs of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren jostling for space on the Bechstein grand piano
As of Easter, this place will serve as a visitor attraction when the Royal Family are not there.
Slowly and methodically, HRP have set about restoring and rearranging everything inside and out, under the watchful eye of the royals, notably Prince Charles.
Among his ideas is the new pavilion in the walled garden, built by eight students of traditional building crafts from his Prince’s Foundation. As he himself observed in his speech to mark this week’s reopening, Hillsborough is ‘one of those places that many have heard of and yet few had ever visited’.
Ask those who remember it from the old days and it has been a hell of a transformation. ‘We haven’t tried to put it back to a particular point in time or gloss over certain moments in history,’ says chief curator, Christopher Warleigh-Lack. ‘This is about layers of history.’
So, while there might be a portrait of George III on the wall, the incongruous and hefty plastic handles on the French windows in the State Drawing Room will remain. They were needed to open the rocket-proof glass doors and bomb-proofing is regarded as an integral part of the history of this house.
Unlike, say, Windsor, Hillsborough Castle does not look like a castle. Though there is an old fort across the road, this is a Georgian country house built on classical lines.
This the ‘bog throne’, the beautiful chair presented to Queen Victoria at the 1851 Great Exhibition, made from wood taken from a nearby bog
All arrivals, including the Queen herself, enter through the State Entrance, overlooking the square and the court house of the pretty town of Hillsborough beyond.
Above the door hangs a vast pair of antlers from a long-extinct Irish elk. No one shot this monster. The antlers were actually found in a bog, just like the oak which produced the ‘bog throne’, the beautiful chair presented to Queen Victoria at the 1851 Great Exhibition.
The portraits which welcome you are a combination of royalty and of the family who built the place.
The Hills were local landowners and linen-makers who owned the village of Crumlin and renamed it after themselves when Charles II gave it borough status and a market. They rose to greater prominence through 18th-century politics, acquiring titles and a number estates. By 1922, the family decided they no longer had need of Hillsborough Castle and sold it to the British government for £24,000 (£1.5 million in today’s sums).
Ireland’s war of independence was over and the British government needed a new base from which to run the six counties of Northern Ireland. Hillsborough Castle would become the new Government House, seat of the Governor and of visiting royalty.
Details of all those visits can be found engraved on two shiny spades — used for tree-plantings — propped up by the fireplace.
The Queen first came here as a Princess in 1945, taking her first aeroplane flight en route . . .
We walk through to the Ante-Room, where the visitors’ book is currently open on the page saying ‘William’ and ‘Katherine’, recording February’s stay by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. We walk through to the Throne Room, location for investitures and royal receptions. Unlike the ‘bog throne’, the two real thrones are of the conventional red and gold variety and were installed in 1925.
The huge State Dining Room, where Mo Mowlam’s stepson was a keen roller skater in New Labour days, includes a painting of Lord Arthur Hill — ‘the fattest man in the British Army’. Next door, we find the dark, moody Red Room.
Now used for intimate dinners, it is crammed with works of art from the Royal Collection, including Prince Albert’s collection of 40 miniature portraits of monarchs and their consorts.
The modern political story is also told here through a series of photographs of all the main players in the Good Friday Agreement, including two men whose comrades spent years trying to kill the occupants of this house. Looking at this photo of a cheery Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness sitting on a bench in the garden, you might imagine they were a couple of happy daytrippers.
The curators say they have tried to consult every strand of Northern Irish life, including nationalists and Sinn Fein, to ask what they would expect to see on display. ‘We wanted to find out what people might regard as a barrier to entry,’ says Christopher Warleigh-Lack.
So, the portrait of William of Orange is not the usual one of the victorious Protestant King Billy astride a horse at the Battle of the Boyne. Instead, it shows him as a boy. Elsewhere, 18th and 19th-century cartoons poking fun at the Irish hang alongside Irish cartoons poking fun at the British. Some may complain the displays are over-sensitive.
I can see no traditional portraits of the Queen in full regal mode, as you might find in an embassy. Tucked away in a small sitting room called Lady Grey’s Study is a 1985 portrait of the monarch in ordinary day dress by the Irish-Spanish painter, Rodrigo Moynihan.
It hangs alongside a matching portrait of Prince Philip in casual clothes. Apparently, someone has even complained that these are ‘too imperial’. The State Drawing Room is striking for its lack of Old Masters and royal portraits.
Instead, it is full of works by the favourite Irish artists of the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales. In any stately home, the bedrooms are always of great interest. The royal ones remain strictly off-limits, but I am allowed to see where successive politicians would rest their troubled heads.
Nestled away inside the grounds is the Lime Tree Walk, which leads up to Lady Alice’s temple. The small temple was originally given as a wedding gift to Lady Alice Hill by her brother the 5th Marquess of Downshire in 1867
Since a separate annexe has just been built for the political residents, the old Northern Irish Secretary’s suite will soon be opened to the public. They will see the bathroom where Mo Mowlam frequently let the bath overflow (to the frustration of the maintenance team).
They will also see the master bedroom redesigned by Peter (now Lord) Mandelson during his term in office. With a large bed and chaise longue in olive green offset by beige wall coverings, the Mandelson boudoir is the only room in the house with views to the north and south.
Mr Mandelson was a particularly hands-on tenant, redecorating some of the Royal Household rooms along the royal corridor. With rose-patterned wallpaper, stripped-oak floors and contemporary chrome fittings in the bathrooms, there is a boutique hotel feel to this former ancestral pile.
Out in the grounds, which host an annual garden party for 2,000 of the great and good of Ulster, the change is even more pronounced.
Top garden designers Catherine FitzGerald (married to actor Dominic West) and Andrew Lutyens have rejuvenated Hillsborough’s 100 acres with new borders, parterres and 33,000 bulbs along one avenue alone.
A jungle of weeds and trees hiding an old bog has been reclaimed as a ‘lost garden’ with duckboard trails and stepping stones for children.
Most impressive of all has been the rebirth of the magnificent four-acre walled garden. This was a tip until Mo Mowlam installed some sheep to eat the undergrowth. It remained little more than a field, however.
Now, it is completely reborn with herb gardens, orchards and vegetable patches arranged around a new central fountain.
The produce will be served up in the new visitor centre next door. In pride of place is the Prince of Wales’s new pavilion. Having enjoyed great success in resurrecting his walled gardens at Highgrove and Dumfries House, he has high hopes for Hillsborough, too.
The rose beds in Lady Granville’s Garden — created by the Queen Mother’s sister, wife of a former Governor — have also had a new lease of life.
From Maundy Thursday, all this will be opened up to the general public (except when royals are in residence). Themed tours — including royal ones, political ones and even an ‘LGBT tour’ devoted to Hillsborough’s gay past — will be on offer. More than 200,000 people are expected this year alone.
For the moment, Northern Ireland’s most successful tourist attractions remain the Titanic museum and the film locations for the blockbuster series, Game of Thrones. How much longer, though, before these are overtaken by the real thing?