Today Maggie can see the irony - that her one failure in an otherwise illustrious academic career was to be the one real passion in her life - at Tatton Park.

"I work every day with history at Tatton," she says.

"It just goes to show that sometimes qualifications on paper aren't everything. Dedication and flair count for an awful lot."

Maggie leaves her job as collections' manager at Tatton this week after 14 years on the historical estate.

"It is a property to which I have been dedicated to for what feels like an enormous amount of time," she says.

"Having been here for 14 years it feels like I am leaving the baby in the process of having its nappy changed."

When Maggie, 52, first took on the role of housekeeping manager at Tatton she found she was more or less thrown in at the deep end.

For one of her first jobs in 1987 was to perform a full guided tour of the mansion to the Duchess of Gloucester and her royal entourage.

"I had only started four months earlier and so hardly knew anything of the history of the place," she says. "It was all rather alarming.

"All the barriers had been removed and I found that I could hardly find my way around.

"The architecture is all so symmetrical I found I couldn't tell one end from the other."

But Maggie relished the prospect of researching the history of Tatton, and one of the things she says she will miss most when she leaves is having such a detailed knowledge of the estate.

It was to be an intense apprenticeship. For she worked and lived at the estate for seven years as housekeeper until her job title changed to collections' manager in 1994.

"Living in the mansion had its drawbacks," she says.

"It was wonderful looking out over the gardens at night, but you are essentially a prisoner behind locked gates.

"It was quite a claustrophobic environment."

But working at Tatton, Maggie has also had her fair share of travel - completing scholarships in Italy and she even transported a famous Tatton painting to New York and back in 1990.

"I was sent to America to act as a courier for a Canaletto painting to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

"I don't know about the painting, but I was treated to travelling first class.

"You are almost expected to drink champagne on board, but because I was 'on duty' I couldn't drink a drop," she says.

Maggie was born in Graz, Austria, in August 1948.

Her father George was a lieutenant colonel in the army and was stationed in Austria for the first three years of her life.

The family then moved to Germany when her sister Annie was born a year later.

Maggie remembers playing with local children, speaking fluent German and becoming bilingual at a young age.

The family moved back to England when Maggie was five and when she was 10 they moved to a large old Victorian house in Shrewsbury.

"So began the collecting of antiques," says Maggie.

"My mother filled the house with gorgeous antiques and I lived my life surrounded by them."

Maggie was sent to Dr Williams' Boarding School in North Wales that year, and despite admitting to some homesickness adapted to her studies and became something of an academic.

At 18 she went to Leeds University where she studied French, German, Latin and Arabic.

After graduation she took a secretarial course and soon got work at a translation agency in London.

But after four years in the city, Maggie realised she yearned to be back in the countryside of her childhood and got a job as an administrative officer with Shropshire Libraries based in Shrewsbury.

"I looked after six libraries and was involved with the maintenance of buildings - including the 16th century library in Shrewsbury.

"It gave me some vital experience of historic building conservation."

After 13 years in the job, she reached a crossroads in her life where she needed to redirect her career.

"It was very personal reasons but I felt I wanted to move on," she said.

"I was in the process of going through a divorce and needed to have a complete change of scene."

After looking in a local government magazine, she noticed an advertisement for the job of housekeeping manager at Tatton Park.

More than 130 applied for the job, but Maggie's personality shone through and she got the job, much to her amazement.

"The National Trust said that I had knocked them flat with the sparkle and enthusiasm I had shown," she says.

Maggie set to work at Tatton in what was at that time a very male-orientated management.

"There was a lot of ex-servicemen working there and they were all rather dubious about a woman being appointed.

"I think they were all shocked that 'the woman' had got the job," she says.

One of the first tasks she undertook was proof-reading the guide book and revising the visitors' guides in French and German.

She is fluent in five different languages and recent began learning Italian at evening classes.

So it is of no surprise that Maggie finds communication has been one of the keys to her success in her 14-year reign at Tatton.

"I have worked closely with house staff and developed great friendships with all the room stewards.

"Working as a team is the key to the way I work."

It will stand her in excellent stead for her new role with the National Trust at Stourhead House in Wiltshire.

There she continues the role of collections' manager and is excited at the prospect of working with and looking after a large collection of Thomas Chippendale furniture.

And it is, she says, an opportunity to get back to the core principles of the National Trust itself.

"Tatton is commercially orientated and that is not the National Trust's focus," says Maggie.

"So I am moving to a house where I can give the collections a much higher profile.

"I've basically had enough of being marginalised."

With her two cats in tow from her current home in Moulton, near Northwich, Stourhead House is bound to welcome a woman passionate about her work - and her history.