Charles Spencer Visits the Althorp House Memorial to His Late Sister Princess Diana

For the last few weeks, Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer, has been posting photos on social media showing his ancestral estate, Althorp House, as the seasons change. On Tuesday, he shared an image showing a recent visit to the property’s memorial honoring his late sister, Princess Diana.

After her death in 1997, Diana was buried on a small island inside the Oval, a lake on the grounds of her family home, about 250 yards away from the main house. An existing Doric temple on the grounds was turned into a memorial for the late princess, and it features her silhouette in marble alongside two quotations and a metal bench. Thirty-six oak trees were planted alongside the lake, one for each year of her life. In 2017, Prince William, Princess Kate, and Prince Harry joined the Spencer family at Althorp for a ceremony to rededicate the gravesite after an extensive renovation. 

In his January memoir Spare, Harry said he took wife Meghan Markle for her first visit to the island, which can only be accessed by rowboat, during a 2022 trip to the UK. “Uncle Charles came down to the water’s edge, gave us a little shove. We waved to him, and to my two aunts. Bye. See you in a bit,” he wrote of the trip. “Gliding across the pond, I gazed around at Althorp’s rolling fields and ancient trees, the thousands of green acres where my mother grew up, and where, though things weren’t perfect, she’d known some peace.”

On Thanksgiving, Spencer shared a picture of a recent visit to Malibu with the caption, “Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans – from Manhattan to Malibu (both of which I’ve visited in the past few weeks)” and a turkey emoji. No word on if he visited Harry and Meghan, who live an hour’s drive north in Montecito, a small Santa Barbara enclave.