Downton Abbey | Bampton Old Grammar School — The Gate to Downton Cottage Hospital

The fight over the cottage hospital ran for most of a series, and the building they fought over is a village library.

On Church View, near the junction with Church Street, stands a squat gabled block of Cotswold stone that a wool merchant named Robert Veysey paid for in 1635. The first schoolmaster was appointed in 1650. The building was finished in 1653, and it taught Bampton's boys for three centuries.

Downton's production team dressed the gateway as the entrance to Downton Cottage Hospital. It is that gate, not the interior, that appears while Isobel and the Dowager Countess wage their long and exquisitely polite war over who should control the place — a plot about local autonomy versus county administration, staged at the door of a seventeenth-century grammar school.

Inside now are Oxfordshire's public library shelves and the Bampton Community Archive, a volunteer-run museum of the village's own history, including the Morris dancing tradition that is older than the school itself. The archive has gathered material about the filming too, assembled by the people who lived through it.

Go in. Borrowing a book from a building that spent a whole series arguing about medical governance is the most satisfying thing you can do in Bampton, and it costs nothing.

Photo: andrew auger, Geograph Britain and Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0.