EMMA COWING: A precious glimpse into the Queen's happy home trends now

It's a picture that has been burnished into the collective memory. Queen Elizabeth II smiling, a little frail, clutching her late husband’s shepherd’s crook while a roaring fire blazed behind her, just 24 hours before she died.

We all remember the time, and indeed the place: September 8, 2022, at Balmoral Castle – the place where the late Queen felt most at home.

Now, for the very first time, we too can take a peek inside the inner sanctum of that home.

Earlier this week, it was announced that the King would open the doors of Balmoral throughout July and August for guided tours that include some of the Royal Family’s private rooms, including the very room that photograph was taken in.

The small group tour tickets cost £100, or £150 if you fancy afternoon tea thrown in.

It didn’t take long for the naysayers to swing into action. How dare the Royals charge money to let us look inside their houses? Who on earth could possibly be interested?

Well, quite a lot of people, actually. Within hours of the announcement, tickets were sold out.

This is not an anomaly. There is a private guided tour at Windsor, and another available at Buckingham Palace, all for far more than the normal ticket price.

But there’s something special about Balmoral, partly because we have never before been invited quite so far inside the door.

Its very mystique, the knowledge that this is where the Royals are at their most private and where they have, on occasion, let their hair down, gives it an irresistible allure.

For so many years Balmoral was the Queen’s hideaway, where she revelled in being out in the gloaming (she apparently got grumpy if she didn’t have at least one hour of fresh air a day), and pulled on the Marigolds to do the washing up after Prince Philip’s famous barbecues.

David Cameron recalls once pitching in to help only to hear Her Majesty bark: ‘What on earth is the Prime Minister doing?’

‘I’d broken with protocol and rapidly sat back down and did as I was told,’ he revealed.

But I think it also tells us something about the King’s future plans for the home his mother loved. It is no great secret that he and Queen Camilla far prefer the down-at-home atmosphere of their own retreat on the estate, Birkhall – where they have thrown raucous New Year parties, where Charles went down on one knee to propose and to which they retreated when the country went into lockdown.

Balmoral has, since the Queen’s death, been a quieter place, and her indomitable presence hugely missed.

This move, to open up the spaces once so dear to her, suggests that the King’s long-term plan may well be to turn Balmoral into something appropriating a permanent memorial to his mother. It seems a fitting tribute somehow, and one of which I suspect she would have approved.

As for the ticket price? Well, like every other stately home in this country, Balmoral Castle is in constant need of upkeep, something that doesn’t come cheap.

Charging a few extra bob to those who recognise that Balmoral is living history and an insight into our longest-reigning monarch seems a pretty neat solution to me.