Hello, I'm coming to you from high on a hill in the Darbyshire countryside and what I can see is the most amazing wall and behind it as I enter through the gate house.

The magnificent hardware hall.

One of the most perfect of all the Elizabethan Prodigy houses has been described as the supreme triumph of Elizabethan architecture.

This magnificent building with three stories and it's symmetrical, it's perfectly symmetrical.

It's in a kind of golden stone and it is impressively tall particularly for the Tudor period.

Magnificent, I mean really vast windows with diamond-pained glass.

The glass was very much valued by the Elizabethans and the Jacobian as a kind of status symbol showed off your wealth.

And there are six great turrets.

And the amazing thing about these turrets is that depending on which angle you look at this building, the place looks entirely different.

At the very top between the turrets, the roofs that you can walk on, if you're lucky enough, and the balustrade are topped with a coat of arms with stags and they're surmounted with initials e and s under a cornet.

And these are the initials for Elizabeth Countess of Shrewsbury, better known to history as best of Hardwick.

And she built this new hall, a stone throw away from the old hall where she had been born at around 1527 to John Hardwick and his wife Elizabeth.

So she's a daughter of a kind of minor landowner.

We need to think of her as being a member of the gentry, parish gentry rather than county.

And I think one of the most important and formative experiences of her youth was that her father died when she was seven months old.

And as a result of this, his lands were seized. The lands weren't also in her mother's name.

The lands were seized and administered on her brother's behalf by the crown through the Office of Wards.

So there's a financial instability, a period of financial instability, and her childhood.

And I think that was very important. And in her 60s, when she was a widow, she began to build Hardwick, New Hall, this magnificent building here, with the wealth that she had acquired over four marriages.

Building work started in November 1590, which is the same month as she buried husband number four, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury.

Barriers that had started happy but had become deeply troubled as time went on. And she moved in around her 70th birthday.

And I must say that by the end of the 16th century, she was the second richest woman in the country after Elizabeth I.

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