‘We’ve always treated our 6,000-acre estate like an elderly relative that needs looking after’

There is, it turns out, a knack for herding deer. “You have to be very careful that you’re driving on the outside of the herd,” says Peter Wiggins-Davies over the sound of his truck’s engine as a group of fallow deer skitter in the park at Revesby. “Otherwise they could clear the fence.”

Deer management is just one of the skills that Peter, as chief executive of Revesby, has had to adopt in recent years.

Growing up at the estate, 12 miles from Boston, Lincolnshire, his was a Swallows and Amazons kind of childhood, in which “danger was never too far away – and in which I was expected to contribute from an early age”.

As a result, “I fell in love with the estate early doors,” he says. “From the very beginning, it felt like an elderly relative that needed looking after. It was a place of great happiness, great community, a place that almost existed in its own identity, in its own way of life, and it was clear to me that I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to it.”