Yorkshire, England — Armorial crests, ancestral portraits and a Great Hall to display them in. Even if we're not to the manner born, we can all dream of being kings and queens for a day in the noble houses of Yorkshire.

Travelers who venture an hour by fast train out of London to this northeast quadrant of England discover elegant spa towns and wild vales and moors. England's largest county is a favorite of hikers, golfers and lovers of the grand country estate.

Betsa Marsh / Travel Arts Syndicate (ENLARGE)

Castle Howard, home to the Howard family for 300 years and star of the new remake of 'Brideshead Revisited.'

Betsa Marsh / Travel Arts Syndicate (ENLARGE)

Harewood House, which dates to the mid-18th century, is the residence of Lord Harewood, first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II.

Betsa Marsh / Travel Arts Syndicate (ENLARGE)

Sebastian Fattorini's family has owned Skipton Castle for 50 years. He's a jeweler by trade, but when his services are needed at the castle, he helps out, even ladling soup for visitors in the castle's Clifford Tea Rooms.

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"This area has the greatest built heritage in Britain," contends Sir Thomas Ingilby, deputy chairman of the Yorkshire Tourist Board. "Everyone knows the châteaux of the Loire, but there are only 17 of them. We have 48, built over a 1,000-year time span."

Ingilby is the 26th generation of his family to call Ripley Castle home — his is one of England's 10 oldest families still in the same residence. Next year, the Ingilbys will mark their 700th year in the stout-walled fortress.

Sir Thomas has spent more than 30 years restoring Ripley Castle, at first forced to sell half the estate to pay death duties and then taking out a multimillion-pound loan to restore the dilapidated buildings.

The castle is very much a family venture. Once when Ingilby's wife Lady Emma Ingilby, was pregnant, she famously greeted a group of clay pigeon-shooting guests one morning, and returned to serve them tea that afternoon — having delivered a baby in the interval. The Ingilbys' youngest child, 12-year-old son Richard, leads the rousing castle tours for children.

Family legends reach back 26 generations, especially to the 16th and 17th centuries when, Sir Thomas writes in the castle guide book, the Ingilbys had an "uncanny ability to spot the losing side many years before trouble ever started, and then back it with all their might."

His ancestors, given four days' notice, hurriedly hired a plasterer to gussy up the Tower Room ceiling before King James I arrived in 1603, a gesture that went royally unrewarded.

In a nook of the Knight's Chamber, a bit of family history springs open at just the right touch. In an era when training for the Catholic priesthood was high treason, Francis Ingilby went to France, took holy orders and dared to preach in secret across northern England. The family carved a hole into the thick wall to hide him, safe behind a wooden panel. Although he was later arrested in York, hung, drawn and quartered, it wasn't the family or the house that gave him up. His priest's bolthole was discovered only when the room was being treated for beetle and dry rot — in 1964.

It's the quirks of family and the twists of history that make a Yorkshire castle tour so much fun.

Sebastian Fattorini's family has owned Skipton Castle for 50 years. The previous owner, he deadpans, "had it since 1310."

Fattorini, a jeweler by training and family trade, was pressed into taking on the challenge of the castle 10 years ago. While he longs to make jewelry, the demands of one of England's oldest medieval castles keep him too busy for more than "soldering an old lock."

Skipton Castle, with its forbidding gatehouse and formidable round towers, was clearly built for battle — first against the Saxons, when its Norman French owner built it in 1090, and later during the 15th-century War of the Roses.

A century later in the civil war, Skipton was one of the last Royalist castles to fall to Cromwell after a three-year siege.

The melding of great house and grand garden into a pleasing whole became an English ideal in the 17th and 18th centuries. Newby Hall, home of the Compton family for nearly 250 years, is a refined example, full of neoclassical Roman armor and Greek vases worked in the plaster to Robert Adam's designs and furniture built for the house by Thomas Chippendale. Outside, the gardening crew sees to what may be Europe's longest herbaceous border, a towering mosaic of heritage roses, golden achillea, orange helenium and purple salvia.

Prince Charles and Camilla "come here quite a lot," guide Eric Nunns confides, but it's another royal connection that catches the eye. Three vast pages of calligraphy line the staircase, illuminated with hand-colored letters and affixed with a royal seal. It took King Charles II's scribes yards of vellum to say the monarch owed the Comptons half a million pounds. "A debt," Nunns says, "that was never paid."

The royal link may be strongest at Harewood House, home to the Earl of Harewood, first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II. The queen has visited the 1771 mansion, as did Princess Victoria and Grandduke Nicholas before they assumed the thrones of England and Russia respectively.

Lord Harewood's family gave Chippendale, cabinetmaker supreme, one of his biggest commissions, for 10,000 pounds in the 1770s. He spent years building bureaus, making beds, even carving wooden pelmets to look like fabric above the windows in the Gallery.

"It is a grand house, but I feel it does have a human scale," says David Viscount Lascelles, Lord Harewood's eldest son. "You can actually imagine sitting by the fire, doing your needlework or talking after dinner.

"It does have the magnificent views for the owners and guests to enjoy. Country houses were built to impress — that's why they had the best architects, designers and landscape designers of the time."

IF YOU GO

Getting there

Expect to pay $700 round trip from Atlanta to London in the offseason, $1,000 or more in summer. British Airways often offers airfare/hotel packages in the early spring and fall.

Where to stay

• Devonshire Arms Country House Hotel and Spa, Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire. The Duke of Devonshire rotates artwork from his grand Derbyshire estate, Chatsworth, to this countryside hotel near the ruins of Bolton Abbey. The hotel, once a coaching inn, won Yorkshire Tourist Board Hotel of Year 2007 (under 50 rooms) and his chef won Yorkshire Life chef of the year 2007. Doubles from $560. 011-44-01756-710441, www.devonshirehotels.co.uk .

• The Boar's Head Hotel, Ripley Castle Estate, Ripley. Sir Thomas and Lady Ingilby have transformed the Star Inn, a popular pub and stagecoach stop about a century ago, into this hotel. Doubles from $250. 011-44- 01423-771888, www.boarsheadripley.co.uk .

• Worsley Arms Hotel, Hovingham, near York. Doubles from $230. 011-44-01653-628234, www.worsleyarms.com .

Where to eat

• Burlington Restaurant, Devonshire Arms Country House Hotel and Spa, Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire. Chef Michael Wignall presides over this Michelin-starred restaurant; the three-course table d'hote menu is $116. Closed Mondays. 011-44-01756-710441; www.devonshirehotels.co.uk .

• Devonshire Brasserie. Meals often include vegetables from the hotel's garden, served in the renovated stables. Entrees from $28. Same location and contact information as above.

• The Ivy Brasserie, Grange Hotel, 1 Clifton, York. Tucked off the lobby in a room alive with trompe l'oeil scenes from the nearby race course. Entrees from $26. 011-44-01904-644744, www.grangehotel.co.uk .

• Worsley Arms Hotel, Hovingham, near York. Creative menus such as marinated seafood and smoked salmon salad, pan-fried venison steak with butternut squash puree and bacon and juniper jus, followed by mango panna cotta with Chantilly cream. Three-course meals, $60. 011-44-01653-628234, www.worsleyarms.com .

• Court Yard, 1 Montpellier Mews, Harrogate. A two-course lunch or early dinner from $24. Entrees from $26. Closed Sundays. 011-44-01423-530708.

Information

• Yorkshire: www.enjoyenglandsnorthcountry.com .

• Britain: 1-800-462-2748, www.visitbritain.com .

Betsa Marsh, author of "The Eccentric Traveler: A World of Curious Adventures," is a winner of the Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers.