The Real-Life ‘Holy Grail’ Castle Is Full of Monty Python References
As of this week, it’s officially been 50 years since Monty Python and the Holy Grail first hit theaters. While some Python fans may choose to celebrate this milestone by paying nearly $300 to ask John Cleese questions about the production after watching the movie for the billionth time, here’s another idea: Why not visit the castle where much of The Holy Grail was filmed?
The building itself dates back to the 14th century, as The Daily Telegraph recently reported, but Scotland’s Doune Castle has fully embraced the fact that it’s become a tourist destination for Monty Python obsessives who are eager to visit the spot where King Arthur was taunted by an outrageous French soldier.
Doune Castle wasn’t actually the Pythons’ first choice for a filming location. “We’d picked all these wonderful castles,” Terry Jones explained in Monty Python Speaks: The Complete Oral History, “and then two weeks before we were due to start filming we suddenly got this letter from the Department of the Environment of Scotland saying we couldn’t use any of their castles.” Apparently, the organization believed that the project was “inconsistent with the dignity of the fabric of the buildings.”
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Luckily, Doune Castle was privately owned at the time, and the shoot was okayed at the last minute. As a result of the snafu, Doune Castle had to play several different castles, including Castle Anthrax and Camelot.
Per The Telegraph, the Doune Castle gift shop currently sells copies of the Holy Grail screenplay and coconut shells for fans looking to re-enact scenes from the film. They were even selling Python merch back when Jones and Michael Palin visited the castle for a 2001 documentary.
And the castle’s audio guide for visitors is narrated by Jones and Terry Gilliam, who co-directed The Holy Grail together. In addition to sharing anecdotes about the production, they also offer “a lesson on Doune’s long history, featuring overnight stays by both Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie.” Presumably that portion of the tour contains less stories about Cleese being a pain in the butt.
It’s perhaps no surprise that the castle would cater to Holy Grail enthusiasts. In 2005, The Guardian reported that around a third of the castle’s visitors were Python fans, which inspired Historic Scotland to create a special “Monty Python Day” in Doune.
And it’s not like Monty Python and the Holy Grail was the only big budget production that ever filmed at Doune; the 1952 Elizabeth Taylor movie Ivanhoe utilized the historic castle, but they never hosted an “Ivanhoe Day.” More recently, the castle has appeared in episodes of Outlander and Game of Thrones.
Weirdly, the Game of Thrones episode in which a character literally says "your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries” in Low Valyrian wasn’t filmed at Doune Castle.
