Gruesome deaths happen on a surprisingly regular basis around here. The most recent was during a stage production of Amadeus. The crowd was enraptured as the actor slid a shining silver knife across his throat. Thick red liquid began to spill to the floor, and his eyes bore a look of sheer terror. Special effects at their finest, thought the audience, until the shrieking woman beside him prompted the realisation that he had, in fact, accidentally ended his own life. 

Yet another untimely demise to add to the dozens forced upon the people of this sleepy Oxfordshire town, with its crumbling castle and 13th-century churches. Thankfully for the locals, the murderous nature of this place exists only within the realms of fiction. For Wallingford, which sits on the Thames between Reading and Oxford, has for years starred as the fictional town of Causton in ITV’s Midsomer Murders.

During filming, the independent shops dress their windows for the occasion, roads are closed, and the drama’s cast descends on the town centre – including John Nettles and Neil Dudgeon, the keen-eyed detectives kept busy by the resident psychopaths and con-artists. Fortunately, real-life visitors have nothing to fear. Wallingford’s actual population is a well-to-do bunch and the town centre is a charming little place when the cameras are packed away.

Celebrity cachet

So charming, in fact, that it has long attracted the attention of the great and the good. The Corn Exchange theatre that appeared in Midsomer’s Death of a Hollow Man episode was presided over for a quarter of a century by Agatha Christie, no less, who lived just down the road in grade II-listed Winterbrook House. The handsome 17th-century, riverside property was put up for sale last year (for a cool £2.75m) and a group of residents are hoping to raise enough funds to turn it into a museum. For now, Christie superfans can admire it from the road, peek at its gardens, and then tackle the council’s Agatha Christie walking trail.