The real Downton Abbey

NOT since Yorkshire's Castle Howard has an English country pile so captured the imagination of television audiences.

Highclere Castle

NOT since Yorkshire's Castle Howard featured as the stately home in the 1980s series Brideshead Revisited has an English country pile so captured the imagination of television audiences.

Unless you have been lost amid the convoluted arcades of a garden maze and unable to watch Downton Abbey, you will know that this immaculately detailed drama series is set just before World War I. Across seven episodes it features the changes in fortune of Robert, Earl of Grantham, his American heiress wife and their often difficult daughters, and was largely filmed in and around a real country house.

You first see the immensity of the residence in the opening sequences, lording it over seemingly limitless parkland dotted with ancient cedars. This is Highclere Castle at Newbury on the border of Berkshire and Hampshire, ancestral home of the earls of Carnarvon since the late 17th century. In residence in the house, if one can use such an insubstantial word for a building with more than 50 bedrooms, is Geordie, the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, who inherited it a decade ago; his second wife, Fiona, Countess of Carnarvon, and their three children. The castle stands on the site of a house recorded in the Domesday Book and the estate was owned by the bishops of Winchester for eight centuries. The present building was conceived by the architect of London's Houses of Parliament, Charles Barry, in 1842, at the behest of the 3rd earl of Carnarvon. Barry's Elizabethan building is in honeyed Bath stone with a great hall that echoes those of English medieval palaces; he remodelled Highclere in true Renaissance revival style with castle-like proportions, a soaring central tower and corner turrets. The design was not completed until after his death in 1860, and the interiors, all parlour palms and Victorian velvet furniture, were finished by 1878.

You do have to wonder if Highclere -- with its precious tapestries, heraldic shields and museum of Egyptian artefacts from Tutankhamen's tomb -- isn't a bit of a burden to run. I immediately think of the mouldering manors with collapsing roofs that Ruth Watson tries to help save on her Country House Rescue TV series.

It can cost tens of thousands of pounds a year just for heating bills at the average English estate and Highclere is bigger than most, with about 300 rooms. Although the Carnarvons might be pressed to say so, the Downton Abbey effect surely has been a financial blessing. Last year they fought off an unsolicited offer from neighbour Andrew Lloyd Webber to buy Highclere as a home for his art collection. Apparently he got wind that the 8th Earl needed pound stg. 11.5 million for essential repairs and had applied to the local council to redevelop woodland on the estate to build housing.

Highclere Castle is also a popular wedding venue -- most infamously, perhaps, for the 2005 nuptials, complete with pink thrones, of Peter Andre and Katie Price (Jordan) -- but it's all about Downton Abbey now, with visitor numbers up at least sixfold. The series has been a ratings smash in Australia, too, where Sunday evenings have been dominated for those of us who love period romances by the Crawley family and the will-they-or-won't-they relationship of eldest daughter Mary and distant cousin Matthew.

Lady Carnarvon tells me that filming of the second series of Downton Abbey, which will open with Britain entering World War I, finished at "8pm on June 29", just in time for Highclere to open to the public for the summer. While she admits that having Britain's most expensive period drama series filmed in your home is "hugely disruptive", she says it's great fun and not unusual for her to step over dust-sheets to pop into, say, a bedroom and find it's full of people.

"They move the furniture around a bit," she says, and the family's more contemporary items were removed for the filming, but some areas of the house have been off limits, such as her kitchen. "They use our steps that go to the basement level in the series but the actual kitchen and below-stairs scenes are filmed at Ealing [Studios]," she explains.

The crew may not have been allowed to rip out her Aga range, but Lady Carnarvon is more than a little fascinated with life downstairs and has thoroughly researched Highclere's history. She tells me that in one era the poor footmen had to have their hair powdered and lacquered if there were more than 10 guests. She's thrilled to have discovered a "real" Crawley and a Bates (the on-screen valet to Lord Grantham) among old staff records.

She is also rushing to finish a book to tie in with the release of series two. The subject is Almina, 5th countess of Carnarvon, who was instrumental in turning Highclere into a military hospital for wounded officers in World War I.

A visit to Highclere is an oddly intimate affair, despite its immensity. There are framed family photos and flowers -- massed hydrangeas, pots of merry red geraniums -- in every room, and while there are ropes across bedroom doorways, it's much like visiting a confidently rich family's home, with the odd mussed-up cushion and discarded magazine. There's none of the detachment of wandering about a fusty museum. There, quite casually in a corner, is a leather-topped desk and ornate claw-footed chair that were owned by Napoleon Bonaparte.

There are portraits by Joshua Reynolds, a looming Van Dyk masterpiece in the dining room, and renderings of bloodied swans and peacocks. Young earls in waiting, painted in silk suits and lace collars, survey the whole affair with tight, serious faces.

In the double-room library, pedimented bookcases house more than 5600 volumes and on display are myriad photos of the royal family on casual visits to Highclere. This vast chamber is where Downton Abbey's Earl of Grantham discusses the workings of the house with his head butler. A random peek at one bookshelf reveals aristocratic sporting tomes with titles such as The Art of Wildfowling, Famous Fox Hunters and Letters to Young Shooters.

In the men's smoking room, with its worn leather lounge suite and faded tangerine walls, the ceiling has always been plainly painted, a room attendant tells me, because of the damaging effects of nicotine as the gentlemen withdrew after dinner to puff away and waffle over whiskies. By contrast, the airy drawing room, preserve of the ladies, is lined with French spring green silk and features displays of 18th-century bird-patterned Meissen china.

It's easy to imagine Maggie Smith, who plays Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, sitting upright in the chintzy morning room, forever on the verge of a biting comment. Certain pivotal scenes take place in the bedrooms off the first-floor gallery. Apparently many Downton Abbey fans want to see "the red one" (the rose-coloured Stanhope Bedroom) in which the fetching Turkish diplomat Mr Pamuk's body is laid out after his heart attack while trysting in Lady Mary's bed.

The Mercia Bedroom, one of four linked chambers along the south side of the house, is perhaps the prettiest (used by Cora, the Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey) but the Carnarvons prefer the front-facing Herbert Bedroom, which is linked to the library below by a spiral staircase; shoes, make-up and bedside books are in evidence (Lady Carnarvon appears to be reading Jane Austen).

The gardens, spread across more than 400ha, are a delight, with wildflower meadows, yew-arched walkways, an avenue of beeches, and plantings of figs and crabapples. A folly on the east lawn makes a lovely vantage point to survey the park, designed in 1774 by Capability Brown with his trademark uninterrupted vistas.

Clearly the Carnarvons are grateful to family friend Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, for choosing their home as a set. How ironic that a TV drama could be the biggest boost to Highclere's fortunes since the 5th earl married Almina, from the moneyed De Rothschild clan. He sponsored archeologist Howard Carter's expedition to open Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922. It seems the Carnarvons have forever been entrepreneurial.

Susan Kurosawa was a guest of British Airways and Visit Britain. The first series of Downton Abbey ends this Sunday, 8.30pm, Seven.

Checklist
Highclere Castle is open from Sunday to Thursday until September 1 and on selected dates in October; it is about 90 minutes by car from central London. More: highclerecastle.co.uk. Themed mini-coach tours and private chauffeured outings are available from Brit Movie Tours. More: britmovietours.com.

British Airways is offering Club World (business class) fares to London from $6999 plus taxes to July 31 (minimum stay of five days). For World Traveller Plus (premium economy), there are 14-day advance purchase fares for sale to September 30 from $3255 plus taxes. More: 1300 767 177; ba.com.

www.visitbritain.com.au