near standstill. This was due not just to stricter application of legislation, but also in part due to the aforementioned high-profile Destruction of the Country House exhibition held in 1974 by the Victoria and Albert Museum. However, the damage to the nation's heritage had been done. The future By 1984 public and Government opinion had so changed that a campaign to save the semi-derelict Calke Abbey in Derbyshire was successful. Writing in 1992 in The Daily Telegraph, 47 years after his father wrote his melancholy novel prophesying the decline of country house life, Auberon Waugh felt confident enough of the survival of the country house as a domestic residence to declare: "I would be surprised if there is any greater happiness than that provided by a game of croquet played on an English lawn through a summer's afternoon, after a good luncheon and with the prospect of a good dinner ahead. There are not that many things which the English do better than anyone else. It is encouraging to think we are still holding on to a few of them." Waugh was writing of the survival of Brympton d'Evercy in Somerset, which in the preceding 50 years had been transformed from an ancestral home and hub of an estate, into a school. Then, following a brief period while its owners tried to save it as a stately home open to the public, it had been sold and purchased for use as a private residence once again, albeit also doubling as a wedding venue and sometimes a film set; both common and lucrative sources of country house income in the 21st century. The 21st century has also seen many country houses transformed into places of seemingly antiquated luxury, in order to meet the demand for a new British institution, the country house hotel. This has been the fate of Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire and Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. Others remain private houses, but with the principal rooms being hired out as film sets and venues for events and weddings. Occasionally, country houses have been saved for purely public appreciation as a result of public appeals and campaigns, such as Tyntesfield, a Victorian Gothic Revival mansion in North Somerset, which was saved as an entirety with its contents in 2002. In 2007, after a prolonged and controversial appeal, Dumfries House, an important Scottish country house complete with its original Chippendale furnishings, was