ENGLAND // Castle Howard has 145 rooms, took a century to build and was big enough to have its own railway station until the 1950s. Thanks to its role in both the TV series and the film of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, for many it's the definitive aristocratic estate. To cap it all, it's still owned by the Howard family (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard are relations), who began building it in 1699 on the site of ruined Henderskelfe Castle. The house took so long to build that it has two entirely different styles - exuberant baroque in the earlier East Wing, and simpler Palladian in the later West Wing. Inside are enormous riches: statues, an altar, the grand Great Hall, magnificent stained-glass windows and paintings by Van Dyck and Hans Holbein. Yet the gardens are many visitors' favourites. It's a classic tamed landscape, with artificial lakes, rhododendrons, peacocks and rare trees adorning a great swathe of parkland. Classical statues and pyramids are joined by the Temple of the Four Winds, a folly that's half cutesy holiday lodge, half Roman palace. Wandering the grounds, you feel transported by an environment that mixes the honest pleasures of the outdoors with the extravagant fantasies of long-gone nobles.