On location in West Dorset — the films and TV series shot near Beaminster
West Dorset has a problem with being too beautiful, especially if you’re looking for films and TV series shot near Beaminster. Directors come for a single scene, fall hopelessly in love with the light on the cliffs, the honey‑coloured manor houses, and the stillness of the early‑morning countryside — and end up using the whole area.
That’s why the landscape surrounding Blackbird Cottage appears in some of the most celebrated productions of the last sixty years. Broadchurch, Rebecca, Far from the Madding Crowd, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Emma, Ammonite, On Chesil Beach — all filmed in or around West Dorset.
Many of these filming locations are right on the doorstep or just a short drive away. Here’s your guide to finding them.
Mapperton House — the most filmed estate in West Dorset
Distance from Blackbird Cottage: 10 minutes
Address: Mapperton, Beaminster DT8 3NR
Opening: March to October, daily 10am to 5pm
Mapperton has a sense of timelessness which filmmakers have not failed to notice. The formal gardens run the length of a steep-sided Dorset coombe with diverse locations terraces, topiary, pools, summerhouses and barns and all two hours from London’s film
The result is that Mapperton has been used more consistently as a film location than almost any other estate in the South West and the films it has appeared in make for a genuinely remarkable list.
Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
The farmhouse inherited by Bathsheba Everdene is Mapperton House. Mapperton’s distinctive golden stone façade and sloping grounds evoke Hardy’s fictional community of Weatherbury. The house’s interiors, furniture and artefacts transport viewers back to Victorian Dorset. Mapperton’s formal gardens, greenhouse, ponds and trails also feature prominently. The elegant front courtyard was transformed into a mud-caked 19th century farmyard for the filming — extraordinary to think of now when you visit.
Rebecca (2020)
Mapperton is one of a number of historic houses used as a location representing Manderley — the beautiful but sinister mansion that is central to the plot of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel. The film follows a young newly-wed (Lily James) who arrives at Manderley, her new husband’s imposing family estate. The gardens were dressed magnificently for the party scene and the Countess of Sandwich described it as the best-organised film ever shot at Mapperton.
Emma (1996)
Mapperton appears as Randalls, the home of Mrs Weston, in the Gwyneth Paltrow adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Built entirely of tawny Ham Hill stone, the house, with its integral church, stables, barns and dovecot, glows serenely in the sunlight, seemingly untouched since the 17th century.
Restoration (1995)
Restoration starring Robert Downey Jr and Hugh Grant was filmed in the Fountain Court at Mapperton. The film won an Academy Award and the Fountain Court with its topiary, pots of tulips and period detail was a perfect stand-in for the 1660s.
If you visit Mapperton after watching any of these films, the recognition is immediate and rather wonderful. The gardens, the terraces and the golden stone frontage are exactly as they appear on screen except that in real life they are better, and completely yours to explore.
Insider tip: go on a weekday morning to have the gardens largely to yourself. The wild garden at the bottom of the terraces is the part most visitors miss and the part that filmmakers love most.
West Bay and the Broadchurch coast
Distance from Blackbird Cottage: 25 minutes
Address: West Bay, Bridport DT6 4EN
West Dorset’s stunning coastline played a starring role in ITV drama Broadchurch, starring David Tennant and Olivia Colman. Sites which featured in the series include a number of locations in and around the seaside resort of West Bay including East Cliff, West Bay Harbour and the Quay West development as well as other locations nearby at Eype and Freshwater.
Broadchurch was the television drama that made West Bay famous to millions of viewers who had never heard of it and the response when people arrive and see the real thing for the first time is consistently one of recognition and wonder. The iconic amber sandstone cliffs of East Cliff. The harbour. The beach. The coastal path stretching away in both directions.
ITV’s hit crime drama has been described by its writer, Chris Chibnall, as “a love letter to the Jurassic Coast”. The cliffs, the sea and the beach in and around West Bay are all key to the story set in the fictional town of Broadchurch that gripped the nation.
Walking the Broadchurch locations is a genuinely lovely afternoon from the cottage. Drive to West Bay, walk east along the South West Coast Path under the cliffs and back along the seafront. The locations are immediately recognisable and the scenery which the programme spent three series featuring is every bit as magnificent as it appears on screen.
The Harbour Inn at West Bay is dog-friendly and a good spot for a post-walk drink with a view of the harbour that featured so prominently in the series.
Lyme Regis — The French Lieutenant's Woman and beyond
Distance from Blackbird Cottage: 45 minutes
Address: Lyme Regis, Dorset DT7 3JP
Meryl Streep dressed in a black cloak staring out to sea from the end of a windswept Cobb remains an iconic image from the 1981 five-time Oscar-nominated film The French Lieutenant’s Woman, based on the novel by John Fowles.
John Fowles moved to Lyme Regis in 1965 and while walking one day on the town’s imposing Cobb, Fowles was struck by the sight of a woman who stood motionless, staring out to sea. The French Lieutenant’s Woman was born.
In the summer of 1980, Parlon Productions took over Lyme Regis for six weeks of filming. Locations used include Ware House, Pinhay House, the Three Cups Hotel, the Royal Lion Hotel, the lower half of Broad Street and the famous high wall of the Cobb. The bookshop on Broad Street was left dressed as it appeared in the film after shooting finished.
Standing at the end of the Cobb and looking back at the town which has barely changed since 1980 is one of those moments where the film and reality collapse into each other in a way that only the best on-location filmmaking achieves.
Lyme Regis has continued to attract filmmakers. Season 3 of Heartstopper was filmed in Lyme Regis with beach scenes shown in the series. Scenes from Wonka were filmed in Lyme Regis with the Cobb being transformed into a winter wonderland.
And most significantly, Lyme Regis, Charmouth and Eype Beach starred in the Mary Anning biopic Ammonite, released in 2020, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan. Filming was done on Broad Street, Coombe Street and the Cobb, as well as beach scenes filmed at Charmouth and Eype. For anyone who visits Charmouth or Eype Beach for fossil hunting after watching Ammonite both are only twenty minutes from the cottage the atmosphere is extraordinary.
Eype Beach — Far from the Madding Crowd and Ammonite
Distance from Blackbird Cottage: 20 minutes
Parking: DT6 6AP
Eype Beach has appeared in two significant films and both times for the same reason, it is one of the most dramatically beautiful and unspoilt stretches of the Jurassic Coast.
The dramatic cliffs at Eype feature prominently in Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) as the site where a young, out-of-control sheepdog drives off Gabriel Oak’s sheep. The scene is one of the most memorable in the film and the cliffs which you can see for yourself on a twenty-minute drive from the cottage are exactly as dramatic in reality.
Eype Beach also appeared in Ammonite as one of the key coastal locations. The Mary Anning biopic used beach scenes filmed at Charmouth and Eype alongside the town of Lyme Regis itself.
Dogs are welcome at Eype Beach all year round off the lead making it an excellent option for combining a film location visit with a proper beach walk.
Chesil Beach — On Chesil Beach
Distance from Blackbird Cottage: 35 minutes
Viewing point: Abbotsbury DT3 4JT
Dorset’s unique 17-mile shingle spit looked magnificent in the 2018 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach. Set in the 1960s, this powerful drama starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle was filmed in moody, overcast weather which perfectly suits the sombre mood of the film.
Chesil Beach is one of the most extraordinary natural features in England — a narrow shingle ridge stretching 18 miles along the Dorset coast — and seeing it for the first time is genuinely breathtaking. The best viewing point is from the road above Abbotsbury, looking west along the ridge with the Fleet lagoon on one side and the open sea on the other.
Combining a visit to Chesil Beach with a trip to the Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens and the Abbotsbury Swannery makes for one of the finest full-day excursions from the cottage.
Athelhampton House — Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence
Distance from Blackbird Cottage: 35 minutes
Address: Athelhampton, Dorchester DT2 7LG
Athelhampton House and Gardens was used as the main location in this mystery thriller. Though filming was done in Dorset, the film was actually set in Wiltshire.
The BBC adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence, starring Bill Nighy and Anna Chancellor, used Athelhampton as its primary location — and it is immediately clear why. The Tudor manor’s dramatic Great Hall, its formal gardens and its atmospheric setting in the Dorset countryside made it a perfect stand-in for a classic Christie country house mystery.
Visiting Athelhampton after watching the series is a lovely experience the house is open daily and the interiors that featured in the production are accessible on the house tour, included with garden admission. Adults £14.50. Dogs welcome on leads in the gardens.
Forde Abbey — Far from the Madding Crowd and Restoration
Distance from Blackbird Cottage: 20 minutes
Address: Chard, Somerset TA20 4LU
The 1995 film Restoration was filmed at Mapperton House and Forde Abbey. Far from the Madding Crowd also featured Forde Abbey alongside Mapperton House, Sherborne, Maiden Castle and West Bay.
Forde Abbey is a 900-year-old former Cistercian monastery with 30 acres of award-winning gardens and its extraordinary medieval architecture and grounds have made it a natural choice for period filmmakers. The gardens are outstanding in their own right, with tulip displays in spring and herbaceous borders in summer that rival any in the South West.
Open daily. Adults £14. The on-site café is excellent for lunch.
A note on Thomas Hardy
It would be impossible to write about film locations in West Dorset without acknowledging the presence of Thomas Hardy — because Hardy is, in a very real sense, the reason so many filmmakers come here.
Hardy lived and worked in this landscape for his entire life. The hills, the valleys, the market towns and the Jurassic Coast that appear again and again in his novels are the same hills, valleys, towns and coast that you see from the car window on the drive from Blackbird Cottage to Mapperton or West Bay or Lyme Regis.
When Far from the Madding Crowd was filmed at Mapperton, when Broadchurch was shot at West Bay, when Rebecca filmed its garden party at Mapperton — all of them were, consciously or not, working within a landscape that Hardy made famous and that has barely changed since he wrote about it.
Standing in the market square at Beaminster on a quiet October morning, it is not difficult to understand why.
Your base for exploring on-screen Dorset
From Blackbird Cottage in the heart of Beaminster, all of these locations are within easy reach and several are practically on the doorstep.