Where was Under Salt Marsh filmed?

When the body of a nine-year-old boy is uncovered in a drainage ditch in Under Salt Marsh, local teacher Jackie Ellis believes it may be connected to the disappearance of her niece, who hasn't been seen for three years.

Jackie was a detective when Nessa went missing – a case which cost her her career and destroyed her friendship with former partner Detective Eric Bull, who returns to the remote Welsh town after failing to solve what happened.

But the pair must put their differences aside if they have any hope of uncovering what's really going on in this tight-knit community – especially with a once-in-a-generation storm en route, threatening to wipe out any evidence they find.

"With the onslaught of the weather and the epic storm that comes at the end, in the final episode, those environmental forces become huge in the story," creator, writer and director Claire Oakley told RadioTimes.com.

"They're inescapable, and there's a lot of focus of, 'What are we going to do?' And how is this community going to survive and help each other through such an onslaught.

"They've got this dual pressure: there's the investigation and the sense that somebody amongst them has killed a child, and then there's this onslaught from the sea and from the weather and these outside forces."

The town where Under Salt Marsh is set is called Morfa Halen, which is fictional. But the cast and crew did film on location in Wales, in landscapes where the elements play a powerful role in shaping daily life.

So, where was it filmed in reality? Find out below.

Where was Under Salt Marsh filmed?

The series was largely filmed in Barmouth and Fairbourne, in north-west Wales.

The cast and crew also spent time in Anglesey and Cardiff, where the team "built a marsh on a set for the big finale," Oakley explained. "But we did shoot out on a lot of real marshes."

Harry Lawtey (Dylan Rees, whose nephew James is best friends with murder victim Cefin), added that while "the town in the show is fictional, it was definitely modelled on the place we actually were."

"We shot largely on historic marshland – a magnificent place, breathtakingly stunning and kind of mighty really – and it's difficult to be there and not get a sense of nature around you and that playing a part in people's daily lives.

"It's part of the fabric of what these communities are and that was something we spoke about a lot with Claire. Everyone in the show has a relationship to the town, and it's a character in their lives, undeniably."

"The location is so important to the storyline," continued Naomi Yang (DC Jess Deng), who knew as soon as she read the scripts that "visually, it was going to be so stunning".

"So much of it is just drone shots of the area," she said. "It's such a key part of it, it's almost like another character in the series."

Because of the distance between Yang's home in London and where they were based – "it was quite remote, about a seven, eight hour journey, door to door" – she decided to stay in Wales for the full five-week block.

"And you feel so small because... it's so vast," she said. "You open the door and you've got the sea and the mountains, and there's such an atmosphere and energy about the place.

"And we were also filming in winter, so you can't escape your environment, your dynamic with the environment is so much stronger than when I'm living in London. You can kind of just go about your day not really think about that, but you can't help but have a dynamic with where you're living in that place.

"It's definitely the most remote place that I've filmed in, and it really seeps into you in a way that it must do for the people of Morfa Halen."

It was the salt marshes of north Wales that initially inspired Claire Oakley to write Under Salt Marsh.

"They're such amazing places," she told RadioTimes.com. "I just really wanted to find a story that allowed me to look at these places. I've always liked how the Americans mythologise their landscapes and bring this sense of greatness, or they make them feel heroic, in a way.

"And I wanted to do that around the landscapes in north Wales, and... that's where the idea of this police investigation came from, that it was going to be really entwined with the landscape so we could look at the plants, at the water, how salty the levels are, to forensically look at this landscape and be in it."

Shell Island, in north Wales, near Porthmadog, also provided a key part of the inspiration.

"I had this idea of setting a community way out on the end of a causeway," she explained, referencing Shell Island. "There's a campsite at the end of a long causeway. You can only get there on low tide, and it gave me the idea of setting it in a town and to have this long causeway that would cross the salt marsh.

"It's a space where, really, we shouldn't be building, we shouldn't have built towns. These salt marshes protect our island from the sea, and they absorb a lot of water. They absorb a lot of carbon, like 10 times more carbon than a forest. And they're very precious environments. But a lot of them have been drained for farming or to build on. And then we make ourselves very vulnerable on the edge of the coast there.

"And I love the idea of this community that was precarious and vulnerable. And I love the idea that they have to solve the crime before the evidence might get washed away."

Read more:

• Who's in the cast of Under Salt Marsh?
• Under Salt Marsh review: Flood-stricken crime drama continues the rise of Welsh noir
• Slow Horses' Jonathan Pryce on returning to his Welsh roots with new drama: "I left it physically, but emotionally, I've never left"

The first two episodes of Under Salt Marsh will premiere on Sky Atlantic and NOW on January 30th with a new episode following the next four Fridays.

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