Highclere Castle
Highclere Castle in Hampshire is the Victorian Gothic country house familiar to millions around the world as Downton Abbey, the fictional Yorkshire estate of the television drama created by Julian Fellowes that ran from 2010 to 2015 and achieved remarkable international success. The castle's association with the programme has brought visitors from Japan, the United States, Australia and across Europe who wish to see the exterior and interiors used in the filming, and the resulting surge in visitor numbers has made Highclere one of the most visited country houses in the south of England.
The castle was transformed into its present form between 1842 and 1878 by Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, for the third Earl of Carnarvon. Barry's design in the High Victorian Gothic style replaced an earlier eighteenth-century mansion with the current elaborate confection of towers, turrets and pinnacles in a warm yellow Bath stone that creates an imposing and photogenic silhouette above its parkland setting. The interior contains a sequence of Victorian state rooms of considerable splendour, furnished with an impressive collection of paintings, tapestries and decorative objects accumulated by successive Carnarvon generations.
The castle has a second remarkable claim to historical interest entirely independent of its television fame. The fifth Earl of Carnarvon was the principal financial backer of Howard Carter's Egyptian archaeological excavations that in November 1922 discovered the intact tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, the most spectacular archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. The castle holds a collection of Egyptian antiquities brought back by the fifth Earl, displayed in a dedicated Egyptian exhibition, and the story of the discovery and the deaths that followed provides the castle with a genuine historical drama to set alongside its television associations.