Today has been an outstanding day. We had a ticketed time for 1:30 today at Highclere Castle. If you aren't a Downton Abbey fan you probably are not aware that this is the primary location for filming this series. Highclere has been the background for numerous movies, but Downton Abbey is the series that has generated huge surges of visitors and enough income for starting some of the major repairs needed.
As Downton fans, being here is a big deal for us. We had a leisurely morning in our accommodation, but got ourselves ready and out the door at 12:00 for a stroll to the castle. Our AirBnB host told us how to walk the back roads to the castle.
It took us about an hour to walk to Highclere, enjoying the scenery along the way, past cottages and and country estates.
Lord and Lady Carnavon live in the big house in the winter when the Castle is closed to tourists, and retreat to a summer cottage on the property during tourist season.
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| Our first glimpse of Highclere on 6,000 acres |
We were the first tour group of the season and bought a special ticket for today. It is listed as a special tour. We don't really know what that means but are looking forward to finding out.
It turns out that our tour was limited in size and leisurely paced. There are about 60 of us all together (usually there are 1300 people a day!) going through the castle. The 60 of us are split into three groups with three guides, and Lady Carnarvon meets us on the third step up from the bottom of the grand staircase and welcomes us to the castle. Wow, didn't expect this. The small groups, ours had 12 adults and four children start in the older part of the home built during the Georgian era. Lady Carnarvon then catches up with our tour group for a little while as she passes through and out the back door to do her work. She is a blogger, writer, and takes an active roll in running the castle and promoting it. The current Earl is the eighth in succession to the Castle.
Our guide had been a staff member before Downton Abbey was filmed here and had some great stories to tell us. She also served as one of the overseers to the film crew of Downton Abbey. We were unable to take photographs inside the estate, so the photos you see of the interior were taken from a complementary book given to us at the end of the tour.
We spent nearly 2 hours inside moving from rooms that were in the series and a few that were not.
Mary's bedroom and the downstairs servant areas were filmed in a studio setting. The rooms downstairs in Highclere where the kitchen would have been in Downton Abbey had long been converted to a King Tut and Egyptian exhibition and museum. The fifth Earl of Carnarvan was an amateur Egyptologist and funder of Howard Carter who discovered the tomb in 1922. This is a fascinating story of discovery and demise of the fifth Earl.
Upon the conclusion of house tour and Egyptian museum, we were given vouchers for the tea room in the back courtyard where we served tea sandwiches, tea cakes and biscuits, and of course tea, coffee, juices, or sparkling water. We shared a table with a mother and daughter from Hong Kong. The daughter was in her twenties interning as a fashion designer in London. She spoke excellent English. Her mother had come for a visit and did not speak any English. We learned from the daughter, that they had watched the whole series of Downton Abbey with Chinese subtitles. The series is popular all over the world.
When finished with our tea it was nearly 4:00 pm. Our last stop was the gift shop where we were given a gift bag that weighed at least 5 lbs. Each of us received a coffee table size book of Downton Abbey. We were able to trade one of the books for two of Lady Carnarvon's other books on the Ladies of Carnarvon. All were hand signed by Lady Carnarvon.
We spent the rest of the afternoon wondering the grounds and gardens. We even found the Secret Garden used in the film of the same name.
The grounds closed at 5:00 at the same time we walked out. We had the gardens virtually to ourselves.
It was wonderful and a birthday present I hope to always remember. By the time we returned to our accommodations and then walked to dinner to the Red House just down the street from our accommodations, we had logged about 6 miles of walking for the day.
Our television in our room doesn't really work, so we were looking forward to watching the quarter final match between England and Columbia at the local pub. It was an exciting game that culminated in an overtime kick out. The emotions of the pub goers and soccer fans were high, low, high and finally jubilant for the Brits!
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| Everyone is in watching the game! |
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| Tense moments |
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| Jubilant moments |
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| Mixed moments - man in the middle cannot bring himself to watch |
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| Last Minute Victory for England |
It was a great way to end our day.
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| Whatever country we are in wins! |
All is Well with the Worrall Travel Rs in Highclere.
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