Byfleet Manor

Where it sits. Byfleet Manor sits at the end of a short lane in Byfleet, a Surrey village wedged between the River Wey, the Wey Navigation and the roar of the M25 and A3 just beyond the trees. Weybridge is a couple of miles north, Woking a similar distance south-west. The setting is unpromising on a map and surprisingly complete on the ground: a modest brick house of two storeys behind old walls and gate piers, a gravel forecourt, a walled garden, and enough mature planting to shut out the twenty-first century entirely. It is Grade II* listed, and it is a private family home — a fact that governs everything about visiting.

The story behind it. Byfleet's manorial history is unusually royal for so small a house. Its predecessor was a royal hunting lodge that Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston, his favourite. Three centuries later, Anne of Denmark, queen consort of James I and the last royal owner of the manor, commissioned a completely new house here in 1617, keeping horses sent by her brother Christian IV of Denmark in the park and spending at least £250 on the building. She died before the work was finished, and according to John Aubrey it was completed by the courtier James Fullerton. The front walls and gate piers you see from the lane date from that campaign. By 1685 the Jacobean house was reported ruinous and was rebuilt on a distinctly smaller footprint, which is why the present manor is domestic rather than palatial. In 1672 the lands had been settled in trust for Catherine of Braganza for her life; a century of near-silence follows in the records. The house then stood largely unaltered until 1905, when it was restored and enlarged with asymmetrical wings — the slight lopsidedness that reads so well on camera. In February 2013 the owners found a hidden room within the fabric.

On screen. Byfleet Manor is the Dower House in Downton Abbey: the home of Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, and therefore the setting for a large share of the series' best-remembered exchanges. When Violet's carriage and later her motor car pull up on the gravel, that is Byfleet's forecourt; the gate piers Anne of Denmark's masons set up in 1617 frame the shot. The house appears across the run of the series and again in the films, always as a deliberate counterweight to Highclere — small, dark-windowed, hemmed in by its garden, the architectural expression of a widow with opinions and reduced square footage. The production returned to Byfleet often enough that the owners now run the house partly as a location and events property. It is not a one-off: Byfleet has also served as a location for Agatha Christie's Poirot in the episode After the Funeral, for the BBC's Cranford, and for the 2014 film of Into the Woods.

What you actually see. Because this is a lived-in private house, there is no ticket office, no shop and no daily opening. Access is through organised events — pre-booked group tours, and the 1920s-styled afternoon teas the owners host in the front rooms and on the patios, timed to the Downton audience — and through occasional open days. Those events, when they run, are the only legitimate way inside, and they sell out fast when a new Downton film puts the property back in the news. What visitors get is the forecourt, the panelled ground-floor rooms, the garden with its old walls, and the plain fact of the scale: the house is far smaller than television makes it look, and the rooms are correspondingly intimate, which is precisely why the camera worked so well here.

Getting there and timing. Byfleet and New Haw station sits on the South Western Railway line from London Waterloo, roughly forty minutes out, with West Byfleet a short distance further and better served; from either, the manor is a walk of about twenty minutes through the village. By road it is minutes from junction 10 or 11 of the M25, though parking in the lane is limited and the house asks visitors at events to use designated arrangements. The right approach is to treat Byfleet as a diary entry rather than a drop-in: look up the current events calendar, secure a place, and build the day around it. Late spring and summer are the sensible seasons, when the garden is at its best and the teas are held outdoors as well as in. Anyone simply passing should be aware that the lane is residential and the house is somebody's home, not an attraction to peer into.