Where Is ‘Outlander’ Really Filmed? 9 Locations Unveiled
This is an excerpt from TV Guide Magazine’s Outlander Forever Special Collector’s Issue, which is available at OutlanderForever.com.
Take a tour of the Outlander‘s most scenic hot spots — and (shhh!) find out where they really shot some of those seductive episodes. We break down some of the show’s most iconic locations.
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Versailles’ Formal Gardens
When Jamie and Claire (Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe, above) are sabotaging the Jacobite uprising in Season 2, their mission takes them to the rich courts of Versailles in Paris. The garden parties and detailed landscaping are in fact the greenery outside Scotland’s own Drummond Castle in the ancient county of Strathearn. They just can’t get away!
Harvard University
Scotland’s University of Glasgow stands in for the well-known Boston college that was founded in the early 1600s. In the third season, when Claire and her daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton) visit Harvard to collect a posthumous honor for late patriarch Frank (Tobias Menzies) in the 1960s, they are actually walking among the Glasgow campus’ much older 15th-century stone archways.
Reunion Beach
In Season 3, Claire is abducted by a British ship to treat typhoid. She escapes, ending up on the tropical island of Saint-Domingue, near her intended destination, Jamaica. The location used for the rocky shoreline — where she and Jamie eventually reunite — is Silverstroom Beach in Cape Town, South Africa. “We did think about [shooting in] Jamaica,” admits exec producer Maril Davis. “But ultimately, Cape Town offered everything.”
Lallybroch
Highlander Jamie often dreamily speaks of his cobblestoned home, Lallybroch. Fans who want to see it in real life must visit Scotland’s five-story 16th-century tower house Midhope Castle. The derelict castle is in the hamlet of Abercorn on the Hopetoun Estate (where the series had shot a number of its earlier scenes), outside of Edinburgh.
The Standing Stones at Craigh na Dun
The mystical stones that Claire — among others — uses to travel through time may not be real, but the spot in which those magical moments occur certainly is. It’s not in Inverness, though. The location where the (Styrofoam!) stones are placed is in the Scottish village of Kinloch Rannoch, overlooking the scenic Rannoch Moor.
The Bakra’s House
In Season 3, eager teen Ian Fraser Murray (John Bell) is captured by pirates in the employ of slippery time traveler Geillis Duncan (Lotte Verbeek) — known as Mrs. Abernathy/the Bakra. Ian meets her inside her Jamaican home, Rose Hall. The tense scenes were filmed at the De Grendel Wine Estate and Restaurant in Cape Town, South Africa.
Parisian Steps
While running errands on the streets of Paris, Claire ascends a path of steps in the bustling city. These stairs, called the Radnicke Schody Steps, are in Prague, Czech Republic, where many of the sophomore season’s Parisian street scenes were filmed. “We chose Prague because the Paris of today does not look like Paris of the 18th century,” Balfe notes.
The Scottish Festival
Where do history-obsessed lovebirds go to hang out in 1970? For Brianna and Roger (Richard Rankin), the answer is a Scottish festival to learn about their heritage, supposedly located in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The festival’s interior and exterior scenes weren’t shot in the States — it was Glasgow, Scotland.
Fraser’s Ridge
Jamie and Claire’s North Carolina settlement is actually in the woods of Doune, Scotland. The functional colonial cabin was built from the ground up, so they could take advantage of the area’s thick foliage. “We wanted scenes where Claire and Jamie could open the door and see the woods and have it look believable and beautiful,” says production designer Jon Gary Steele.
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