Currently in cinemas ‘Me Before You’ the long-awaited big screen adaptation of Jojo Moyes’s critically acclaimed best-selling novel, features scenes shot in Pembroke.

The exhilarating and deeply affecting romantic drama tells the unlikely love story of Lou and Will, played by Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) and Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games movies).

English author and screenwriter JoJo Moyes sees Me Before You as a quintessentially British story, and, in adapting her own global best seller for the screen, felt it vital that its British character and setting be retained, noting, “So much of the novel is shot through with British landscape – the castle, the small town, the class system – I just couldn’t see how it could translate any other way.”

Director Thea Sharrock and producers Karen Rosenfelt (The Twilight Saga) and Alison Owen (Saving Mr. Banks) shared Moyes’s passion and determination to infuse the film with not only the emotion of the novel but its unique geography.

But while the story sets its village in England, the filmmakers looked to West Wales to fulfill its needs for an untouched medieval castle overlooking a town that is studded with terraced housing yet retains its Tudor origins and architecture. And, to Moyes’s delight, that’s just what they found at the remarkable Pembroke Castle in the Welsh town of Pembroke.

Me Before You production designer Andrew McAlpine recalls, “I knew about Pembroke Castle in Wales. It’s a rarity in the sense that it is the perfect pile of stone surrounded by a working village. It had everything I wanted to get across in my design for the larger exteriors of the Traynor home and the right contrast with the neighboring area.”

So, for five days in May last year, the cast and crew descended on Pembroke to film not only at famous landmark, but all around town.

On seeing a world unfold on-camera that has, for so long, existed only in her imagination, Moyes marvels: “When we were filming, Pembroke and the Castle looked so extraordinarily beautiful when we looked at the footage on the monitor. It was fantastic!”

Though England mostly plays itself in the film, Pembroke stood in for much of the small English village where Lou and Will’s story unfolds.

The town provided environments including the local tea house, The Buttered Bun Café, where Lou works when we meet her, and the riverside where Lou desperately pedals to keep up with her active albeit woefully inattentive boyfriend, Patrick (the Harry Potter films’ Matthew Lewis).

However, the exteriors and interior of Grantchester House – the Traynor family home within the castle walls – were filmed at Whytham Abbey in Oxfordshire. Its interior annex – which becomes Will’s entire world once he moves back home – was captured on a set McAlpine constructed at Pinewood Studios.

But the exteriors of his hilltop fortress are all Pembroke Castle and its magnificent grounds, and the regal heritage that renders it the inheritance of the Traynor family merely hints and gestures at Pembroke Castle’s own rich, blue-blooded history.

In 1928, Major General Sir Ivor Philipps acquired the structure and began a painstaking restoration project, which is carried on even today on the privately owned Castle by the General’s surviving family.

The efforts of the Philipps’ family have established Pembroke Castle as a striking and singular filming site that has the eye of a number of filmmakers prior to the Me Before You production.

In addition to its role in Me Before You, the Castle is featured in Anthony Harvey’s 1968 epic The Lion in Winter; the jousting location in Terry Gilliam’s classic Jabberwocky; King Miraz’s castle in the BBC’s 1989 production of Prince Caspian; and as the backdrop for several scenes in Richard II, which aired in 2012 as part of the BBC’s Shakespeare season, The Hollow Crown.

Pembroke Castle in 2016 is a huge tourism draw and currently enjoys over 80,000 visitors a year. Alongside ghost tours and reenactments, it has also reinvented itself as a unique open-air concert venue, with acts including include Jools Holland and Jamie Lawson on tap for 2016.