This is where the lion bit me,” says the 7th Earl of Durham, pointing to a sunny spot in front of Lambton Castle, his crumbling ancestral seat. When the young Ned Lambton posed here with two lion cubs for the launch of his father’s safari park in the 1970s, one of them nipped his leg. He recalls: “I was so proud I had been bitten by a lion that I scratched the scab and kept it on my leg for about a year so I could say, ‘That’s a lion bite.’”
Ned Lambton, pictured with his wife, Marina, need to stump up £28.5m to renovate their Co Durham estate
KATIE LEE
On a sparkling summer day in Co Durham, the lanky aristocrat is posing outside the castle again — now with his wife, Marina, 37 — for the launch of 400 new homes that are