Highclere Castle

Listen to the gravel first. It crunches under every step as the drive curves through open parkland, past huge, dark cedars with flat, spreading branches. Then the trees part, and the house comes into view. It is pale honey-coloured stone with towers, pinnacles and rows of tall windows. On a still morning you may hear only rooks in the trees and the wind across the grass. Highclere Castle sits low and wide in the Hampshire countryside, a few miles south of Newbury.

Many visitors arrive already knowing this house, even if they have never been here. For millions of television viewers, this is Downton Abbey. The drama about the Crawley family and their servants was filmed here, and the feature films came later. But the real story of Highclere is older and stranger than the fiction. It is a story of bishops, earls, a famous architect, and a tomb in the Egyptian desert.

Start with the land itself. Long before the castle existed, this estate belonged to the Bishops of Winchester. They kept a medieval palace here, with deer parks and fishponds. The bishops were among the richest churchmen in England, and Highclere was one of their country retreats. Almost nothing of that palace survives above ground. The estate later passed into private hands, and over the centuries it came to the family who still live here today, the Earls of Carnarvon.

Look around the park as you walk. Its shape is not an accident. In the eighteenth century, the grounds were reworked by Lancelot Brown, better known as Capability Brown. He was the landscape designer who gave English country houses their soft, open, natural look. That look is carefully made. Brown moved earth, planted trees in loose groups, and opened long views across lawns and water. The cedars of Lebanon, with their layered branches, are part of that planted landscape.

Now turn back to the house. What you see today is mostly a Victorian creation. In the nineteenth century, the third Earl of Carnarvon hired Sir Charles Barry to transform an older Georgian house. Barry was the architect who rebuilt the Houses of Parliament in London after a fire. Here is the first surprise for many visitors. If the towers and decorated stonework look a little like Westminster, that is no coincidence. The same mind designed both.

Barry chose a style often called Jacobethan. That word mixes Elizabethan and Jacobean, the styles of English houses around the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Notice the square corner towers, the stone strapwork, and the busy skyline of pinnacles. Notice too how the facade is almost symmetrical. The central tower rises above the rest like a crown. The stone is pale Bath stone, and it changes colour through the day, from cool grey to warm gold in late light.

Inside, the heart of the house is the Saloon. This is a tall central hall that rises through several floors, with Gothic arches and galleries above. Television viewers will recognise it at once. On screen, family members met here and guests gathered here. In real life, it is a room built to impress, with carved woodwork, rich textures on the walls, and a sense of height that pulls your eyes upward. Pause here for a moment and look up before you move on.

As you move through the rooms, look at the paintings. In the dining room hangs a large equestrian portrait of King Charles the First, by the circle of the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck. The library is another highlight. Shelves of leather-bound books line the walls, and the room feels lived in rather than staged. That matters here. Highclere is still a family home. The present Earl and Countess live on the estate, and that gives the house a different feeling from a museum.

Now comes the second surprise, and it lies beneath your feet. In the cellars there is an exhibition about ancient Egypt. Why Egypt, in a Hampshire country house? Because the fifth Earl of Carnarvon was a passionate amateur Egyptologist. He paid for years of excavation in the Valley of the Kings, working with the archaeologist Howard Carter. In November 1922, Carter found the steps leading to the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun, one of the greatest finds in archaeology.

The story did not end happily for the Earl. A few months later, in 1923, he died in Cairo after an infected mosquito bite. Newspapers soon spread the idea of a pharaoh's curse. Here it is important to be clear. The curse is a legend, not history. It was a story that sold papers. The real record is of a long, expensive search, a lucky discovery, and an illness at a time before antibiotics. The cellar exhibition tells this story with objects and reconstructions.

Highclere also has a quieter history of service. During the First World War, Almina, the wife of the fifth Earl, turned the house into a hospital for wounded officers. She organised nurses and care for men coming back from the front. The television drama used a similar idea in its own story. During the Second World War, evacuee children from London were sent here to stay away from the bombing. So the elegant rooms around you once held hospital beds and the voices of city children.

Before you leave, give yourself time outside. Walk along the lawns and look back at the house from different angles. From a distance, you can see how Barry placed it in Brown's landscape, with the towers rising above the trees. Look out for small garden buildings in the wider park, such as follies and temples. These were built for the pleasure of the view, not for any practical use. They were part of the theatre of an eighteenth-century estate.

Now stand still for a moment. Listen again to the rooks, the wind in the cedars, and the gravel under other visitors' feet. Look at the windows and think about who has looked out of them. There were bishops' servants, Victorian earls, wounded soldiers, evacuated children, actors in costume, and a family who still calls this place home. As you walk back down the drive, turn once more. Notice how the pale stone holds the light, long after the sun has dropped.