Sherwood’s Filming Locations Hold Deeper Meaning

The BBC One detective drama Sherwood delves into the “spy cops” scandal, and murder among a tight-knit mining town community. Much of the drama’s appeal is its roots in reality, though. Based on real events, it brings real British tragedies and the obscurity and confusion around them to screen. But where exactly was Sherwood filmed?

Well, some filming took place in the locations that the real life events occurred in. The two murders the show is based around happened near the village of Annesley Woodhouse in 2004, and sparked “suspicion and antipathy” among “lifelong neighbours” and towards the police. Tensions that they haven’t been able to shake, even decades later.

Although, the plot of Sherwood actually takes place in Ashfield, fillming took place in Annesley Woodhouse itself, and the surrounding area of Newton, specifically by Newton Abbey and Newton Station, per The Express. Back in July 2004, Robert Boyer murdered ex-miner Keith 'Froggy' Frogson by assaulting him to death with a sword. Just before, he shot Frogson on his doorstep with a crossbow and after the sword assault, Boyer set fire to Frogson’s home with his daughter and her husband still inside.

Later the same month, Terry Rodgers shot his daughter, Chanel, four times in her Huthwaite home, just weeks after her wedding. Bizarrely, both Boyer and Rodgers fled into the same woodland to hide, per Nottinghamshire Live. This sparked a huge police search and media attention for their small, often forgotten, mining villages.

"It's [Ashfield] a former mining village that doesn't always get a voice on the national stage and I sometimes feel like everyone's talking about us but not necessarily to us,” show writer James Graham told The Express. He also revealed some filming took place in Manchester, Bolton, Blackpool, and Yorkshire, too.

Though originally from Yorkshire, Graham himself lived in Ashfield when the real murder investigations took place. A student at the time, rising tensions sparked by the murders reignited old rifts between striking and working Nottinghamshire miners. "For people who grew up in Nottinghamshire in the former pit villages, this painful stuff split families, it tore friends apart,” he told BBC News. "It was my huge privilege to work with quite a few of the people involved [in the cases].”

“In order to spare them the trauma of going through it again, we have fictionalised the dramas with new characters and new stories but it's certainly inspired by what it was like to grow up in these communities. A big part of this story is about the Metropolitan Police, who were in the county in 1984 to police the miners' strike, having to return to launch this manhunt.”