Lacock Abbey

About this place

In the summer of 1835 William Henry Fox Talbot pointed a small wooden box at a window in his own house and produced what is generally held to be the oldest photographic negative still in existence. The window is still there, in the south gallery of Lacock Abbey, and you can stand in front of it with ten thousand photographs in your pocket; the irony needs no help. The house on the edge of Lacock village in Wiltshire began as an Augustinian nunnery founded by Ela, Countess of Salisbury, in 1232. After the Dissolution Sir William Sharington bought it around 1540, pulled down the church and built his rooms on top of the vaulted cloisters rather than through them, which is why a near-complete thirteenth-century cloister survives under a Tudor country house. Those cloisters are what most visitors have really come for, because they are the Hogwarts corridors of the first two Harry Potter films: the Warming Room with its enormous cauldron became a classroom, the old Sacristy a potions lesson, and the cloister walk is where Harry and friends hurry between classes. There are no gaudy signs and no wand shop, only stone and slanting light, which for a child who wants to genuinely walk through Hogwarts beats the studio tour. Upstairs the house mixes eighteenth-century Gothic with family clutter, and the Great Hall with its odd terracotta figures is worth the climb, but if time is short the right order is cloisters, museum, village. The Fox Talbot Museum, in a sixteenth-century stone barn by the abbey gates, is small and well judged: the story of the first image, the mousetrap cameras Talbot scattered around the house, and a rotating exhibition of modern photography. The village itself is free and is half the point, with streets from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century and not an overhead wire in sight, which is why Downton Abbey, Cranford and the 1995 Pride and Prejudice were filmed here. There is a bakery, a couple of tea-rooms and lanes made for family photographs. From Bath it is about 20 km east, 30 to 35 minutes by car on the A4 then the A350; park at Hither Way for 5 pounds a day and walk a few hundred metres. Without a car, take the train from Bath Spa to Chippenham in about 12 minutes, then the X34 bus or a taxi for the last three miles. Adults pay 21 pounds with no advance booking, under-fives go free, and the family ticket for two adults and three children at 52.50 pounds saves about 21 pounds. Pushchairs manage the grounds and cloisters, but the upper rooms involve stairs and uneven floors. The grounds open all year; the house rooms close from roughly November to February for the annual deep clean and the price drops accordingly, so check the site before a winter visit, and note that last entry to the rooms is 15:45 and the cloisters shut a little before five.