The estate

The History of Highclere Castle

Hours, prices and access verified by the Highclere Castle Tours team — last checked 2026-09-09

Highclere has been continuously occupied for far longer than the house that stands there now. The castle is Victorian; the estate under it is medieval, and the written record starts nearly thirteen centuries ago.

749 AD — the estate before there was a castle

The first written record of Highclere dates to 749, when an Anglo-Saxon king granted the estate to the Bishops of Winchester. It stayed in the church's hands for the best part of eight hundred years. Bishop William of Wykeham, the founder of New College Oxford and Winchester College, built a medieval palace and laid out gardens in the park.

Nothing of that palace is visible above ground today, but the archaeology of the wider estate reaches back further still: an Iron Age fort survives on Beacon Hill, and Bronze Age burial mounds, ancient trackways and old field systems are scattered across the parkland.

1679 — the Sawyers and Highclere Place House

The estate left church ownership and was bought in 1679 by Sir Robert Sawyer, a lawyer who served as Attorney General and who is the direct ancestor of the present Earl of Carnarvon. The medieval palace was rebuilt as a Georgian country house called Highclere Place House. That building is still inside the one you visit — it was never demolished, only wrapped.

1771 — Capability Brown reshapes the park

The first Earl commissioned Capability Brown to lay out the parkland in 1771. Brown did what he did everywhere: removed the formal geometry, moved the ground, and made the result look as though nobody had touched it. Six 18th-century follies from that scheme still stand, and the cedars that frame the house were among the first of their kind brought to Britain.

1842 — Sir Charles Barry builds the castle

The third Earl hired Sir Charles Barry, then at work on the Houses of Parliament, to transform the Georgian house into something that looked ancient. Barry encased it in Bath stone and gave it the towers, turrets and strapwork parapets that make the silhouette recognisable from a single frame of television. The result is Jacobethan — a Victorian idea of what a great Elizabethan house should have looked like.

1922 — the 5th Earl of Carnarvon and Tutankhamun

The most famous person ever to live at Highclere spent much of his life somewhere else. The 5th Earl of Carnarvon funded and joined excavations in Egypt for around sixteen years alongside Howard Carter, working through season after season that produced very little. In November 1922 they reached a sealed door, and behind it was a royal tomb that had lain undisturbed for some three and a half thousand years.

The castle describes the discovery as the world's first global media event, and it was: the world's press gathered at the entrance to the tomb of a fairly minor pharaoh. The Egyptian Exhibition in the castle cellars tells that story and displays finds from the earl's earlier work in the Valley of the Nobles and the Valley of the Queens.

Two world wars, and the twentieth century

During the First World War the castle became a hospital for wounded soldiers, run by the 5th Countess of Carnarvon. In the Second it took in children evacuated from London. Both periods left the house doing something other than being a house, which is a pattern most English country estates of that size share.

Highclere today, and how it became Downton Abbey

The Earl and Countess of Carnarvon live at Highclere, and Lady Carnarvon writes about running it. Between 250 and 300 rooms need a income, and since 2010 a large part of that has come from Downton Abbey, which used the exteriors and the main state rooms throughout its run and the films that followed.

The building that carries all of this is covered room by room on the architecture page, and the figures behind it are set out on the facts page. To see it, check opening dates first, then weigh the Downton Abbey tours from London against driving yourself.

Whichever you choose, Highclere Castle Tours compares them on the one thing that decides most visits: whether the fare includes getting through the front door.