Downton Abbey is Highclere, a vast sylvan hilly estate
in the deep Hampshire County countryside, far from
London, far from the encroaching 21st century sauf for
neat, narrow rural hardtopped byways and the genteel
divided highway from which they emanate. Chosen
by the always astute Julian Fellowes, who wrote the
screenplay for Downton Abbey as well as for Gosford
Park and the novel Snobs, as the ancestral home of the
fictional Crawley family, it is a monumental vertical pile.
The perspective upon approaching Highclere from
the wild meadow below the house and other similar
perspectives is reminiscent of the approach to Lutyens'
HYLAND
