Downton Abbey | Cogges Manor Farm — Yew Tree Farm and Edith's Secret

Edith left her daughter here and came back again and again, pretending to be a family friend.

Yew Tree Farm — the Drewes' tenancy, and the quiet centre of the most painful storyline in the whole series — is Cogges Manor Farm, tucked into a bend of the Windrush on the eastern edge of Witney. The name is older than the show by a very long way. There was a manor here before Domesday, and parts of the buildings date from the thirteenth century.

The house is the one Edith walks up to. The farmyard, the byres, the walled garden and the orchard are all as filmed, because Cogges was already a working heritage farm before the cameras arrived and needed almost no dressing. A charitable trust runs it and it is open to the public: pigs, goats, a chicken run, rural craft workshops, outdoor theatre in summer.

On a weekday in term time the loudest sound in the yard is a small child failing to feed a goat.

That is the strange gift of this location. The farm that carried the show's heaviest secret — a child hidden in plain sight, a mother who could not say the word — is now the one place on the Downton map where the entire point is that children run around it in the open.

Photo: Rabbi WP Thinrod, Geograph Britain and Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0.