A new adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility has swapped studio sets for the real thing — and the locations chosen tell the story as much as the script. Location manager Ian Hutchinson, who scouted every site, says the cast and crew simply fell for the West Country while making the film across Devon and Dorset. For Austen fans, it's essentially a ready-made road trip itinerary.
The Dashwood sisters' grand lost home, Norland Park, is stitched together from two Dorset properties: the 16th-century interiors and grounds of Kingston Maurward House, plus the lake and wooden bridge at nearby Parnham Park, which turned out to teem with wildlife on camera. At the other end of the sisters' fortunes, Barton Cottage in Devon was the hardest nut to crack. The team reviewed roughly 50 remote properties around Dartmoor over three months before finding a derelict stone shell near Plymouth — no doors, no windows, rubble inside. The solution was to build a two-storey set within the ruined walls, letting director Georgia Oakley shoot continuously between cramped interiors and open moor. There was a wrinkle: a protected bats' nest, which required an ecologist to spend three nights counting the colony before permits were granted.
Dartmoor's famous granite outcrop Haytor doubles for a key travelling montage, filmed at dawn with a horse and carriage — a treat few visitors get. Elsewhere, the moodier Cleveland House scenes pair the Gothic exterior of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire with the castle-like interiors of Broughton Castle near Banbury. London's Georgian claustrophobia came courtesy of the National Trust's Rainham Hall in Havering and period street exteriors at Lincoln's Inn in Holborn, both largely untouched by modernity.
Two more names round out the map: West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, whose Italianate opulence signals the wealthy Ferrars family, and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, where a single shot — a carriage perfectly reflected in still water — took five months of searching across the estate to get right. It turned out to be one of the film's most beautiful moments, and took just three hours of waiting for the light.
For travellers, the appeal is obvious: nearly every filming spot is visitable, whether it's strolling the lake at Parnham, climbing Haytor, or touring Rainham Hall's preserved Georgian rooms. You could easily plot a weekend in Dorset around Norland, then push into Devon for the moors, and finish with a London day at Lincoln's Inn.
