A new film adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility has landed, and its location manager says the cast and crew simply fell in love with the West Country. The movie tracks the Dashwood sisters from their grand family home to humbler digs in Devon, and the production leaned hard on real English locations to tell that story of shifting fortunes — no studio backdrops, just genuine stately homes, moors and Georgian streets.
The lost family estate, Norland Park, was assembled from two Dorset sites: Kingston Maurward House supplied the grand 16th-century interiors and exteriors, while nearby Parnham Park contributed the lake and wooden bridge where key sisterly scenes unfold. Location manager Ian Hutchinson recalls being won over by the lake once filming revealed it teemed with wildlife.
Devon's Dartmoor National Park plays arguably the biggest role, standing in for the sisters' much humbler cottage. The crew screened around 50 remote properties before landing on a derelict stone shell with no doors or windows, deep in the park near Plymouth — and then built a full two-storey set inside the ruins so scenes could flow between tight interiors and the wild outdoors without a cut. It came with complications: a protected bat colony required an ecologist to spend three nights on site before filming permits were granted, and the crew battled everything from thunderstorms to a 40-minute supply run from Plymouth. Dartmoor's granite outcrop Haytor also appears, with a horse and carriage filmed at dawn for a travelling montage.
Further afield, the film's moodier stretch pairs the Gothic exterior of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire with interiors of Broughton Castle near Banbury. London scenes make use of the National Trust's Rainham Hall and the untouched period streets of Lincoln's Inn in Holborn — chosen precisely because they still look like old London. West Wycombe Park's opulent Italianate rooms signal the wealth of the Ferrars family, and after a five-month hunt, Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire provided the final hero shot: a carriage perfectly reflected in water beneath a bridge.
For travellers, this is a ready-made itinerary. Most of these properties are open to visitors — Knebworth House, Broughton Castle, Rainham Hall, West Wycombe Park and Blenheim Palace all welcome the public at set times, and Dartmoor and Haytor are free to roam year-round. A road trip linking Dorset's estates with a couple of nights on Dartmoor, finishing in Oxfordshire and London, would let you follow the film's arc from grandeur to moorland to the capital — though you can skip the thunderstorms and bat surveys.
