Ahilya Fort, the philosopher-queen's house on the Narmada

High above the Narmada, some ninety kilometres from Indore in a town most travellers have never heard of, is one of the more unusual places you can spend a night in India: a working family fort, still lived in by the descendants of the woman who built it.

It is worth knowing who she was before you arrive. Ahilyabai Holkar was born in 1725 and took over the Holkar kingdom of Malwa in 1767, after the deaths of her husband and her father-in-law, and ruled it for twenty-eight years. She made this small Narmada town, Maheshwar, her capital — and what she did from here was extraordinary. She rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi, restored Somnath, raised the Vishnupad temple at Gaya, and laid ghats, wells, rest-houses and schools across the whole of India: a building programme run by a queen, from a riverbank in Malwa. The historian John Keay called her the philosopher-queen of Malwa; Nehru wrote that her reign "has become almost legendary as a period during which perfect order and good government prevailed." She championed the town's women weavers, too — Maheshwar is still one of India's great handloom centres, known the country over for the Maheshwari saree.

Her fort, Ahilya Wada, is the one you stay in, and it never left the family. In 2000, Prince Richard Holkar — a direct descendant, and son of the last Maharaja of Indore — opened the family home to guests: nineteen rooms across six old buildings, set among three acres of courtyards, fountains and gardens high above the river. It is emphatically not a hotel dressed as a palace. There is no reception-desk theatre, and no buffet. Dinner is a fixed daily menu, designed by Prince Richard and grown largely in the fort's own organic beds, eaten together at one long table. There is a pool in a walled garden, yoga on the ramparts at dawn, massages — and otherwise the considerable luxury of nothing much to do.