Where is Downton Abbey?

Downton Abbey is filmed at Highclere Castle

Downton Abbey is filmed at Highclere Castle, an estate now forever recognizable as the iconic Grantham home. In real life, Highclere Castle is home the 8th Earl and Countess of Carnarvon. It’s been in the family since 1679 but real estate prices have gone up since then. If Highclere Castle were for sale today, its estimated value is about 150 million British pounds. And Downton Abbey’s set needs about 11 million pounds in repairs. Rumour has it, next door neighbour Andrew Lloyd Webber, offered to buy the estate. “Cats” must have been pretty lucrative.

Located about 50 minutes from Heathrow airport, the Highclere estate is over 1000 acres, bigger than New York’s central park. The Tatler referred to the area around Highclere as “Downtonia”. The house is estimated to have about 50 bedrooms. The countess of Carnarvan, a blonde dynamo, isn’t quite sure how many rooms the castle boasts. “I suppose if you know how many rooms you’ve got, you haven’t got a very big house”, the Countess said in the “Telegraph”. The countess is writing a book about the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. He and Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Egypt’s boy king Tutankhamun in 1922.

Get hitched Downton style

While filming Downton Abbey at Highclere, the estate is only open to the public on certain dates. However, the castle is available for Downton-esque weddings starting at about $30,000 for the day. And what a day it would be… “You enter the Park gates and drive through the undulating, spectacular landscape to arrive eventually in front of a romantic, Victorian Castle. The Saloon, which lies in the heart of the Castle, is licensed for the civil ceremony. Brides can prepare for their wedding in a bedroom in the Castle. The music begins and the bride walks around the Gallery above the guests, before walking down the sweeping Oak Staircase.” The latter is quoted from Highclere’s website. Imagine coming down the staircase… A girl would be jumpier than a deb at her first ball.

If you’re lucky enough to visit Highclere, only the exterior will be recognizable. Most of the indoor scenes in Downton Abbey are filmed at a London studio, particularly the kitchen and servants’ quarters drama. Most of Highclere’s interior has been modernized. The production designer Donal Woods says, “There’s a lot of great houses in England, but all the below-stairs stuff has gone. So we realized we had to build it ourselves.”

Highclere Castle has been featured in other notable filming beside Downton Abbey. The saloon was a location in “The Four Feathers” starring Heath Ledger and Stanley Kubrick’s last film, “Eyes Wide Shut”. The exterior appeared as Lord Graves’s house in “King Ralph”. In Hallmarks’ Hall of Fame 1987 version of The Secret Garden, both the interior and exterior were used as Mistlethwaite Manor.