Lacock

Lacock was given to the National Trust in 1944 by Matilda Talbot along with the abbey and most of the village, and the Trust has kept it visually unchanged: no overhead wires, no television aerials on the street fronts, no road markings, which is why film crews use it constantly, for Pride and Prejudice, Cranford, Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films, where the abbey cloisters served as Hogwarts corridors. Lacock Abbey was founded as a nunnery in 1232, converted to a house at the dissolution and given a Gothic revival hall in the 1750s. In 1835 William Henry Fox Talbot photographed one of its oriel windows and produced what is generally accepted as the oldest surviving photographic negative; a museum in the gatehouse covers his invention of the negative-positive process that all film photography descends from.

Highlights

• The unchanged streets - no aerials, wires or road markings on the fronts.
• The Fox Talbot Museum - the origin of the negative-positive process.
• The abbey cloisters - thirteenth-century vaulting used as Hogwarts corridors.
• The oriel window - the subject of the oldest surviving photographic negative.

When to go

April to October for the abbey and grounds; the village streets are open and free year-round. Filming closes streets at short notice several times a year. Weekends bring heavy day-trip traffic from Bath.

Good to know

This is a lived-in village whose residents are Trust tenants, and photographing into windows and gardens is intrusive and resented. Parking is in a Trust car park outside with a charge. The abbey and museum close in winter.

Nearby

Bath lies southwest; Castle Combe and Corsham are close.

Key facts