Where All Creatures Great and Small is filmed: Darrowby is real — just under another name
Every time an episode ends, some part of me starts pricing out wellies and a move to the Dales. That cobbled square, that pub, those hills that look retouched by someone with an unlimited budget — surely no real place looks like that.
Bad news for my savings account: it does. You just won't find "Darrowby" on any map, because the town playing it is called Grassington.
The village doing the heavy lifting
Grassington sits in Wharfedale, in the Yorkshire Dales, and it was cast for the most practical reason imaginable: it barely needs a makeover. Jacqueline Smith, the show's location manager, put it plainly:
"The nice thing about Grassington was that there weren't any modern houses."
So every spring, a production crew descends, swaps the shopfronts into the 1930s–40s, and the village time-travels for a few days. The greatest hits, if you go looking:
- The Devonshire pub becomes the exterior of The Drovers Arms, the vets' watering hole.
- The Stripey Badger — in real life a bookshop and café — plays the grocer's.
- Skeldale House, the surgery itself, is an actual private house in the village (interiors are studio work, so please don't knock).
- The surrounding co-stars: Broughton Hall as Mrs Pumphrey's pile, plus Malham's limestone drama for all those between-farms drives.
Purists will note the original BBC series used Askrigg as its Darrowby, and that James Herriot's real-life practice was in Thirsk — the fictional town was always a collage of several places. Grassington is simply its current, extremely photogenic body.
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The village is fully aware, and honestly, good for them
This is not a case of a sleepy town grudgingly tolerating a film crew. Cast members wander the square between takes posing for photos with fans who fly in from as far as the US, and Rachel Shenton, who plays Helen, has credited the locals outright:
"We couldn't have wished for more."
Grassington, in turn, is leaning all the way in — the village is building a dedicated visitor attraction celebrating its double life as Darrowby. So yes: the town is real, the pub is real, the hills are real, and you can stand in the middle of all of it. Wellies sold separately.
Previously we wrote: Real linguists tested how Rocky understands Grace in Project Hail Mary — and split on the verdict
