Highclere Castle wedding map print

The bishops of Winchester held this estate for centuries, and in 1679 Sir Robert Sawyer rebuilt their old palace as Place House. The castle you see now is the work of Sir Charles Barry, who remade it for the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon between 1842 and 1849, while also building the Houses of Parliament, and faced it in Bath stone.

Its later stories travelled a long way. In the 1860s the 4th Earl drafted the act that created Canada here, with John A. Macdonald among his guests, and the 5th Earl paid for Howard Carter's search that found Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. Since 2010 the castle has played the house in Downton Abbey, first on television and then in the films.

Capability Brown laid out the park in the 1770s, and in 1821 William Cobbett rode through it and called it the prettiest park he had ever seen. On the map the castle sits among lawns and woodland, its drives running out across the park, while the Temple of Diana and Heaven's Gate, a folly of 1749 on Sidown Hill, belong to the wider estate beyond its edges.