'The past is an underused tool': An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

 In a bleak, deadly period of cold weather known as the Little Ice Age, clever Elizabethan designs helped keep a magnificent stately home unusually warm. The house has lessons for how we can heat our homes more efficiently today.

England's longest river was usually flowing freely. But on New Year's Eve in 1564, the River Thames was frozen solid, from bank to bank. Bonfires crackled on the stuck-fast surface, oxen roasted on spits, and people danced on the ice. Some accounts say that Queen Elizabeth I even practised archery on the glacial river. This sort of thing wasn't a one off. It had happened before: King Henry VIII and his queen had dashed downriver in a sleigh nearly three decades previously in 1537.

These frosty conditions were the result of a climatic plot twist roughly between the 14th and 19th centuries, known today as the Little Ice Age. As well as festivals on the ice, this prolonged cold period brought periods of famine, and frightening unseasonable frosts. Soldiers froze to death in the middle of the European summer.

The cold forced Europeans to develop new ways of coping with extreme weather. One of the best-studied examples of architectural adaptation is Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, England – a building whose design is a carefully choreographed effort to keep as warm as possible.

The same tricks for more efficient heating can be used in modern designs, helping reduce our reliance on fossil fuels today. And they can even inspire small changes in our existing homes to keep temperatures cosier through the winter without turning up the thermostat.