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The question we hear most often from people who have previously done a filming locations tour of some kind — Doctor Who, Downton Abbey, Outlander, the older All Creatures series — is: is this different from those?
The answer is yes, and the reason is the size of the group.
We know what happens with sixteen people because several of our guests have done those tours before booking ours. The bus stops at the filming location. Sixteen people get off. By the time the last person is off, the first is already looking at their phone trying to remember which scene was filmed here. The guide speaks to the group from a distance. There is a photo opportunity. Everyone queues for it. The bus moves on.
The individual scenes are checked off. The overall experience is one of consumption rather than discovery.
Seven people get off the bus. There is room. Your storyteller plays the scene on a screen — you can gather close, you can see it clearly, you can hear the commentary over it. The conversation that follows is a conversation, not a broadcast. Someone remembers a detail from an episode that connects to this location; the storyteller knows what they're referring to; the conversation goes somewhere unexpected.
At the Drovers Arms, seven people fit naturally at the bar and around the tables. You are not a party that has descended on a pub. You are guests.
At the churches, seven people can be still and quiet in a way that sixteen cannot. The silence after the clip plays — the moment when the gap between the screen and the real place closes — requires a certain smallness of group to be possible.
With seven guests, you can take your time. You can choose your angle. You can wait for the right moment. You can take the photograph that actually captures what you came for rather than the photograph you took in a hurry before the group moved on.
Several guests on recent tours have been photographers who specifically chose the small group for this reason.
Some people don't, and that's reasonable. If you want a comprehensive tour of as many locations as possible and the individual experience matters less, there are larger tours that cover more ground more quickly.
But if you have watched All Creatures Great and Small carefully — if the show has mattered to you, if you have a specific relationship with specific scenes — then the small group is not a luxury add-on. It is the thing that makes the day worth having.
Our All Creatures Great & Small tour carries a maximum of seven guests. £169 per person.
Other filming-location tours often carry sixteen or more guests; our All Creatures tour carries a maximum of seven.
With seven guests there's room to gather close and see it clearly, rather than the group experience becoming more about consumption than discovery.
Yes — several guests have described what larger, sixteen-person tours are like before choosing the smaller-group format.