Highclere Castle

Highclere Castle stands in the Hampshire countryside, eight kilometres south of Newbury. Built in 1679 and largely remodelled in the 1840s, it is a Grade I listed country house set in a 2,000-hectare estate. The park was designed by Capability Brown in the 18th century, and the house blends Jacobethan and Italianate styles under architect Charles Barry. It has been the seat of the Earls of Carnarvon for centuries, a branch of the Herbert family. The estate’s history stretches back to an Anglo-Saxon grant in 749 and appears in the Domesday Book of 1086. The castle gained fame as the filming location for *Downton Abbey* and earlier as the setting for *Jeeves and Wooster*. Its long association with the Herbert family includes Robert Sawyer, Attorney General to Charles II, who rebuilt the house in 1679. The estate also nurtured notable figures like Bishop Richard Pococke, a renowned travel writer and orientalist educated at Highclere. William Cobbett, the agricultural writer, praised the park in 1821 as the finest he had seen, with rolling downs, dense woods and herds of prize cattle. Visitors walk through rooms that reflect the 19th-century remodelling, with grand staircases and ornate ceilings. The Egyptian exhibition displays artefacts linked to the Earls’ travels. Outside, the park offers sweeping views of Capability Brown’s landscape, where ancient oaks and beeches frame wide lawns and gentle valleys. Cobbett admired the chalk downs rising steeply beside the park, their smooth green slopes dotted with beechwoods. The estate remains a place where history, architecture and nature come together.