Scene stealer

Its interior was used for the Hamely family's residence in the 1999 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters while the exterior appeared as Baskerville Hall in the classic Sherlock Holmes drama, The Hound of the Baskervilles, shown on BBC 1 on Boxing Day, 2002.

The gardens appeared on Gardeners' World last July and The Winter Gardener this year.

Even the ghosts have had their five minutes, with the hall appearing in Living TV's Most Haunted show.

Levens Hall is open to visitors from April to October every year, so any filming has to fit around this.

The filming of Wives and Daughters took place over three weeks in March 1999. The owners of Levens Hall, Hal and Susie Bagot, had already arranged a holiday in Cuba for some of this time so left their home in the hands of the film's location manager Sue Quinn.

"She actually waved us off from our own houseIt was an extraordinary thing, she was a total stranger," said Mr Bagot.

They returned home to find lights and tents everywhere and rooms stripped of furniture but fortunately no damage.

It was not until April last year that Levens Hall was used again.

"The trouble with filming is once they've filmed you, you are old hat," said Mr Bagot.

The hall was open to visitors at the time, but most of the filming was done outside so it did not cause too much of a disruption.

Some temporary changes had to be made, the most noticeable being to the gateway which was made twice as high, giving an imposing arch and a stone' boar's head on either side.

The heads were actually made out of polystyrene but looked incredibly real.

They filmed carriages going through the gateway time and time again but Mr Bagot said: "It appeared for a fleeting second, you hardly will have noticed it on the actual film."

The snow, which covered a large part of the garden for one of the first scenes, was actually very fine powdered paper.

A carpet was laid down over the grass before being covered in the snow so it could be easily cleared away after filming. However, they put snow on the bushes too.

"The wretched snow would not come off," said Mr Bagot. It took three people three days to clean it up.

Last year a team from Living TV's Most Haunted set up cameras all over the hall.

Mr Bagot said: "They made a great play of finding something terribly odd about what was going on in the house, but as far as I could see they got nothing at all but they made it all terribly haunted." Mr Bagot has never seen any of the ghosts of Levens Hall, even though he accepts that other people see things.

The Bagots do not hide themselves away while the filming is going on. They became good friends with Michael Gambon during the filming of Wives and Daughters because of his interest in steam engines.

"He raced around on our steam engines in his full kit with frock coatit was wonderful," said Mr Bagot.

They also spent an evening with Richard E. Grant during the filming of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Of course all this filming disrupts the Bagot family's life. They have to be around to open the hall for early-morning starts or stay up all night with the ghost-hunters, as well as having to be around at all times to give film crews permission to do various things.

On top of this, all the furniture is moved and there are wires running around everywhere.

But even though it causes total disruption, Mr Bagot said: "I love it because it's a totally different world."

The design of the topiary gardens, started in 1694 by Monsieur Guillame Beaumont, has remained unchanged for more than 300 years and the gardens are now world-famous.

Viewers of the BBC's Gardeners' World programme voted the garden as one of the ten most popular gardens in Britain and, as a result, a team from the BBC came to film the gardens.

This brought in "hoards" of visitors once it was aired on BBC1. No doubt the Winter Flying Gardener will have a similar effect on this year's visitor numbers.

These programmes show an aerial view of the gardens which Mr Bagot said was "absolutely wonderful."

"You don't see the garden from that angle so it's greatit just looks wonderful when you film it from above."

Mr Bagot said he would like Levens Hall to appear in "some big costume drama of the Elizabethan or Jacobean ageElizabeth would have been wonderful but I don't think we are grand enough for that."

However, the size of Levens was not an issue for the filming of Wives and Daughters.

Levens Hall was used for the scenes of inside the Hamleys' home, but the exterior was a house in Wiltshire.

- Levens Hall and gardens are open Sunday to Thursday from April 13 to mid October.

Katie Sunderland.

May 1, 2003 11:00