Opening The Manor House Door - Beyond Downton Abbey: A Guide to 25 Great Houses - page 3

ancestry to people who were once in domestic service. For example, the 1891 census re-
corded more than 1.5 million people were working as house servants in Britain.
Thanks to the works of authors such as Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, and Charles Dickens, along with productions by the BBC, Masterpiece, and others,
Europeans and Americans have enjoyed a long list of costume dramas set in stately homes.
Captivated by the lives and times of the British aristocracy, royalty, and the servants to the
British upper class, the appeal of these stories and settings seems everlasting. Although our
most recent focus is Downton Abbey , before it came many others including The Tudors
miniseries, Pride and Prejudice , and in the early 1970s, the TV series Upstairs, Down-
stairs .
Beyond Downton Abbey
Place. A sense of place.
Creator Julian Fellowes could have named his miniseries The Granthams , The Edwardians ,
Heir to the Abbey , or The Young Ladies of Downton . But he didn't. Instead, he named it for
the great house where most of the series' action takes place. Even the logo for the miniser-
ies and the opening shot of each episode are all about the great pile of a house fictionally
known as Downton Abbey.
Ardent fans of the series know in the real world this historic estate home is named High-
clere Castle and is located in Hampshire, not Yorkshire. Those who've done their research
know that Highclere's history, though quite fascinating, has little to do with the invented
storyline of Downton Abbey. But the Downton Abbey storyline, while fiction, is often re-
peated in great houses across Britain.
We hope you enjoy these 25 great houses, 25 stories, and 25 reasons to visit.