Is Outlander's Fraser's Ridge a Real Place?
After 20 years apart, Claire and Jamie are finally building a life together in the American colonies. And central to their storyline in Outlander's fourth and fifth and sixth seasons is the establishment of their home, Fraser's Ridge, and the community of settlers there.
According to Diana Gabaldon, the author of the books the show is based on, Fraser's Ridge is located "up near Boone and Blowing Rock."
But scenes set in the U.S. are primarily filmed in Scotland, and Scottish woods stand in for northwest North Carolina for much of filming.
"There are sections of Scotland that we have found that do look a bit like North Carolina," the original showrunner Ron Moore said in an interview with Access. "There's a place we've found to put Fraser's Ridge that does read like North Carolina, so that was the big one."
The Outlander Community website, which is officially associated with Starz, explains that "The view of Fraser’s Ridge that we see is made of a combination of footage from a wood in Scotland and a ‘plate shot’ of North Carolina itself." (For those unfamiliar, a "plate shot" is background footage of a location without any actors in it.)
But it was the show's Greens department, or those on the crew responsible for dealing with the foliage, who were really responsible for truly transforming the wood.
"The importance of ‘fraise’, meaning strawberry in French, at Fraser’s Ridge (commonly associated with the etymology of the surname ‘Fraser’) was a fun element for the Greens Department," reads the site. "They cleared the bramble and then redressed with moss, grasses, and bushes to create texture and shape for the area. They wanted to introduce plants that might really grow on a cliff-face: blue grasses, azaleas, ferns, and then incorporated around 300 strawberry plants."
For season six, keeping the filming in Scotland was also helpful for Covid-related safety and logistical reasons. All that said, don't expect Starz to reveal the exact plot of land where scenes at Fraser's Ridge filmed.
“There is a right-to-roam law in Scotland, where you can pretty much go anywhere you want,” executive producer Marin Davis told the New York Post. “Because of that, we like to try to protect some of these people [who live near shooting locations] so they don’t have too many people visiting their properties.”
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