Get the lowdown on what it’s like to tour Highclere Castle. From scoring tickets to what to snag at the gift shop, here’s the scoop.

Visiting Downton, A Tough Ticket To Snag For Tourists

By DIANE DIPPOLD MACINTOSH | MARCH 28, 2015

Highclere Castle, the main filming location of the television series “Downton Abbey,” is a hot ticket for tourists for several reasons. First off it is a working estate, with the eighth Earl and Countess of Carnarvon — George “Geordie” and Fiona Aitken Herbert — living there and therefore it is open to the public only 60 to 70 days a year: a few around Easter and late May, but mainly from mid-July to mid-September. It is closed when the show is being filmed; it also closes on Fridays and Saturdays during the summer in addition to being rented out year-round for weddings and other events.

Highclere, a honey-colored, Bath stone colossus, looms over the television series, a central character in the story. Indeed, creator Julian Fellowes, a longtime friend of the owners, basically transferred the Carnarvons’ history to the fictional Crawleys. The real Highclere Castle was rescued by the 1895 marriage of American heiress Almina Wombwell, rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of financier Alfred de Rothschild, to the fifth earl, just as Cora’s marriage to Lord Grantham saved the fictional Downton Abbey.

But in 2009 the current earl made it known that his ancestral pile needed $18 million in repairs. Seeping water had caused the roof to collapse so the stonework crumbled. Only the ground floor was usable; an article in the Daily Mail recounted “the squalor of stinking damp walls and swarms of flies.”

Just then, scouts for the “Downton” series were scouring estates in the English countryside for suitable houses. Fellowes had first wanted Highclere as the set for his 2001 film “Gosford Park,” but director Robert Altman vetoed it as too far from London. This time, Fellowes held out for Highclere’s 300 rooms, 5,000 acres and history dating to 1086. “To me,” he told an interviewer, “Highclere is a unique architectural statement and tells us much about the confidence of the late Victorians and the confidence of high Empire.”

Click here to read more.