YOU can’t miss Laundry Cottage. It’s the one with the huge Union Jack flapping outside. In a cynical age, the red, white and blue in Cliff Horne’s garden might invite ridicule, the suspicion that whoever ran up the colours was an exhibitionist. But outside this unassuming house set in the grounds of Cholmondeley Castle, it seems entirely appropriate — the unaffected gesture of an old-fashioned patriot.

Horne is what used to be called a retainer, someone who has devoted his working life to the needs of one family. Now retired, for 42 years he was chef to the Cholmondeleys. Before him, his father was the Cholmondeley chauffeur; his mother worked in another of the family’s great houses.

Today the Cholmondeley estate (it’s pronounced “Chumley”) is probably one of the last examples of a near-feudal way of life that most of us thought had vanished generations ago. The 450 people who live within its 7,500 acres know their proper station, and if they question it, they do so very quietly. They talk always of “her ladyship” (Lady Cholmondeley) and though they no longer doff their caps or curtsy, perhaps no one would look twice if they did.

I am there on a summer morning to discover how such an apparent anachronism survives at the start of the 21st century, to meet “her ladyship” and the people of her enclosed and ordered world.

The approach to the castle is impossibly romantic. Emerald acres strewn with orchids, daisies, buttercups. Lakes where gigantic carp roll and swirl. Gardens of magnolia, camellia, azalea and rhododendron. Cedars of Lebanon and spreading oaks among sweet chestnut, lime, beech and plane. And the castle itself — a mock Gothic pile of battlements and crenellations, sitting on top of its hill at the heart of it all.

I wrench myself from fantasies of Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, and ring the bell on a mighty oak door. There is the tap tap of footsteps inside and I am greeted by a cheerful, businesslike woman in blouse, skirt and court shoes. This is Penny, Lady C’s assistant.

“Did you find it all right?” she asks, “It can be a bit confusing. Come in and don’t worry about the dogs.” Inside, the castle is grand and simultaneously homely — a trick pulled off with the help of Iris, a beagle-basset puppy lolloping around the hall. In the study another dog — a lurcher named Daisy — is curled in a basket. On the wall are dozens of framed hunting scenes (Lady Cholmondeley is passionate for the chase). And there, wearing beige slacks with her leg up and resting after a recent injury, is my hostess herself.

“I’ve had a bit of a knock,” she smiles, shaking my hand. An attempt at small talk runs into immediate difficulties. She asks me where I come from and when I say Lancashire, she asks, perfectly genuinely: “Oh, do you know the Seftons?” I can’t quite bring myself to say that the nearest I’ve got to that great northern dynasty is sinking a half of lager in Liverpool’s Sefton Arms.

Lavinia Cholmondley’s husband, George Hugh, died here in 1990 aged 70 but his people still speak lovingly of him as if he were a much-missed father. The couple’s son, David, the present Marquess, who inherited the title and the office of Lord Great Chamberlain, lives at the other family seat, Houghton Hall in Norfolk. A regular face in Tatler magazine, he is, at 43, one of the country’s most eligible bachelors.

Last year, he conducted a census of all the properties and tenants on the two estates — something last done 200 years ago by the first marquess. All were photographed individually by Garlinda Birkbeck and the results bound in three gigantic leather volumes. It is a remarkable record of a community and a way of life on the brink of the 21st century.

I have come here to interview some of these people, to discover what ordinary folk think about living with one pub, one shop, and one landlady. It is an almost inconceivable lifestyle for a visiting thirtysomething with a non-feudal mortgage on a London flat. Half the staff here were born on the estate and those who have lived here ten years or more are still newcomers. One farmer, asked to sum up life on the estate, thought for a moment and replied: “It’s probably the worst place in England to have an affair and get away with it.”

THERE is a clue to Johnnie O’Shea’s trade in the stuffed fox’s head fixed above the front door of his cottage. O’Shea, 66, was huntsman with the Cheshire, looking after the hounds. He is an enthusiastic defender of estate life. We sit with his wife, Ann, in front of a roaring fire. I am drinking tea laced liberally with whisky; Johnnie drinks his whisky straight.

“Lady Cholmondeley is a grand woman. Nobody has a bad word for her,” he says in Irish brogue. “She’s no airs and graces, you know; she’d talk to anybody the same if they were a roadsweeper or a lord. We all look out for one another here.”