A house with a history

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Imagine living in a huge house, a house so big that you don’t know how many rooms it has!

Lady Carnarvon, owner of Castle, is not sure about the number of rooms, but she does know that Highclere is one of the biggest houses in . From the outside, the castle looks like the Houses of Parliament in London. In fact, the same person, Sir , built both places. In the nineteenth century, many wealthy people decided to show off and built massive houses, and the Carnarvons did the same. When Barry finished building Highclere in 1842, the castle had more than fifty rooms, including one room with a fifteen-metre-high ceiling! But this room was only used on special occasions. Today, Highclere is one of the most expensive houses in Britain, worth more than 150 million pounds.

2  Country houses like Highclere sometimes had hundreds of servants. These servants got up before their employers and carried on working after their employers were in bed. They lived in rooms in the basement or attic and used a

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