Highclere Castle Architecture and Layout
One heading here for each named part of the castle and its grounds, in the order you meet them. Photography is not permitted indoors, so this is the closest thing to a walkthrough you will find before you arrive.
Barry's Jacobethan silhouette, 1842
What you see from the drive is a Georgian house in Victorian fancy dress. Sir Charles Barry wrapped the older Highclere Place House in Bath stone and added the corner turrets, the tall central tower and the pierced strapwork parapets that run along the roofline. The style has a name, Jacobethan, and it is a Victorian invention: a nineteenth-century idea of Elizabethan grandeur, executed at a scale the Elizabethans could rarely afford.
The stone is the reason the house photographs the way it does. Bath stone turns honey in low sun, which is why the best exterior pictures are taken late in the afternoon.
The Saloon — the room the house turns around
Every guided tour starts in the Saloon, the double-height hall at the centre of the castle with a Gothic arcade running round it. The walls are hung with embossed Spanish leather, which gives the room its dark, warm colour and its acoustics. On screen it is the room characters cross to get anywhere else, which is exactly what it is in life.
The state rooms
Off the Saloon run the rooms most visitors come for: the Library, the Music Room, the Drawing Room and the State Dining Room. The Library is the one people recognise fastest — it stood in for Lord Grantham's study, and it holds several thousand books. These are the rooms a standard tour covers, and they are accessible to a manual wheelchair.
| Room | What it is | Where you have seen it |
|---|---|---|
| The Saloon | Double-height hall, Gothic arcade, Spanish leather walls | The room everyone crosses to reach anywhere else |
| The Library | Several thousand books across two linked rooms | Lord Grantham's study |
| The Music Room | Italian painted ceiling and embroidered wall panels | Drawing-room scenes |
| The State Dining Room | Hung with a large Van Dyck equestrian portrait | The family dinners |
| The Drawing Room | Green silk walls, the lightest of the state rooms | After-dinner scenes |
| The Gallery bedrooms | Bedrooms opening off the upstairs landing | Upstairs scenes; reached by a steep staircase |
The Gallery bedrooms, and the staircase that guards them
Upstairs, a galleried landing runs around the Saloon with bedrooms opening off it. Reaching them means a long, steep staircase, and the castle limits it to visitors who can climb it unaided at a reasonable pace. If you cannot, photograph albums of those rooms are kept in the Saloon so you do not simply miss them.
The cellars and the Egyptian Exhibition
The old servants' stairs drop into the cellars, and that is where the Egyptian Exhibition sits. It tells the story of the 5th Earl's sixteen years of excavation with Howard Carter and displays antiquities from the Valley of the Nobles and the Valley of the Queens. It is an unexpected thing to find beneath a Hampshire house, and on some tours it is a separate ticket — one small-group day charges five pounds extra for it on arrival.
Capability Brown's park, 1771
The parkland was laid out by Capability Brown and it is doing a job: it frames the house from every approach and hides everything you are not meant to see. The cedars are the giveaway. They were among the first brought into Britain, and they are the trees in the foreground of almost every photograph of the south front.
The six follies
Six eighteenth-century follies survive across the estate, each placed to frame a view rather than to be looked at:
Jackdaw's Castle
On the east lawns, giving the classic view back towards the house.
The Etruscan Temple
A place to sit and look across to the trees on Siddown Hill.
The Temple of Diana
Set above the lake, and the one most visitors photograph.
The gardens
Gardens have been cultivated here since the thirteenth century. Today they are the Monk's Garden, the Secret Garden, the White Border, the Wood of Goodwill, the Rose Arbour, the Wild Flower Meadow and the Healing Herb garden. They open only when the castle is open, so a walk round them is not something you can do independently on a closed day.
Photographs of the facade, the gardens and the follies are on the gallery page. How the building came to look like this is on the history page, and if you want to see it, opening dates and access come first.
Two hours inside is the standard visit
Compare the tours that include castle admission against the ones that leave it to you.