THE LAST time I stood on this spot the actress Keeley Hawes was getting married outside a plywood church to a character called Dick, while fat men in sunglasses sprayed fake snow. I was visiting a movie shoot.

You can see the outcome of the summer’s filming on Boxing Day, when ITV1 airs Under the Greenwood Tree. Based on Thomas Hardy’s classic novel of rural love and country character, it is about a beauty called Fancy and her love-affair with Dick. But will you notice the real hero of the film? Never mind lovely Keeley.

According to the film’s producers, the truly impressive discovery was the location itself. You’d expect a Hardy novel to be filmed in his native Dorset, where the author’s most famous tales were set. But no. It was all done right here, on Jersey, the island that gave its name to a cow, a potato and a woolly jumper — a craggy nine miles by five blob of granite, 12 miles off the French coast.

I’m revisiting the film locations, now that the cameras have gone, to try to understand how an island like this could replicate 19th-century rural England. It’s an intriguing journey, one that Jersey Tourism officials expect many others to follow after the programme is shown. After all, the old TV series Bergerac bucked up the island no end back in the Eighties, and Jersey could do with another dramatic lift.

Twenty years ago the place boasted 25,000 tourist beds, catering particularly for the cheap-booze-and-faggers who came in droves. Now cheap gin is a memory and the bed count is just 12,000. But instead of the beer-belly crowd, they’re pulling in more sophisticated visitors, many of them the kind who’d relish tranquillity and are likely to respond eagerly to that gentle Hardy tag.

Yet what awaits the keen Hardy-hunter? Flying in, you get an opening clue. Never mind the posh finance houses that give the place its big-money gloss, more than half the landscape on this wedge-shaped island, sloping north to south, is clearly still farmed. Fields present a patchwork of cosy, hedge-lined snippets that went out of agricultural style long ago on mainland Britain.

In fact the land here took its shape from small, protected cider-apple orchards that flourished on Jersey from the 17th century. Most are gone, although some are being replanted as the island attempts to hold on to its identity. The field shapes remain, however, shielding potatoes, tomatoes and beautiful brown cows, partly because Jersey farmers do not like change (“They’re independent — and whatever the nice word for mean is,” whispered one local). Selling land and merging farms just isn’t in the blood.

Also unchanged are the cramped, car-scraping roads, many now designated Green Lanes where vehicles must potter at 15mph and walkers and cyclists ramble bucolically. I did a few, straight off the plane, and they were gorgeous. Empty. Quiet.

Greenwood Tree was filmed at three main locations — the prime one being Hamptonne, an isolated cluster of 17th-century buildings in the island’s centre, partly thatched and run as a country life museum. This is where they built the plywood church for Fancy’s wedding, and where they’ve left a couple of rooms exactly as they will appear on screen. You can even touch Keeley’s nightie if you like (I did).

Hamptonne was once the home of a Jersey noble who set the royalist tone that still pervades the island despite its closeness to France by welcoming Charles II to these beamed, smoky rooms. Here I bumped into Maureen Mennian, a costumed guide who appears as an extra in the film. She’s a natural performer and a fount of anecdotes about Keeley and the acting crowd. “People coming here are intelligent, they want to know the heritage of Jersey,” she says. “The film is going to bring in many more people.”

Hamptonne resembles an ancient stone village. Chickens cluck, dung wafts. Turn through 360 degrees and there’s hardly a modern scar visible. Jeremy Gwilt, the film’s producer, told me: “If I’d been trying to film in Dorset I’d have been blanking out yellow lines and taking down TV aerials before I even started creating the environment. I went to Dorset but didn’t see anything that lit my fire.”

Jersey did, though. It has this sense of other-worldliness that springs on the visitor most beautifully on the north coast — the spot where, in the film, Dick and his dad wander clifftop paths discussing the fact that Fancy is out of the poor boy’s social reach. Bless. This tranquil location, called Devil’s Hole, is marked clearly on walking maps.

The landscape is curiously dappled. For the most part it’s untouched — crashing sea, tumbling cliffs, heather and gorse, open land and tight, claustrophobic bays. Then you bump into Jersey’s darker heritage: German bunkers, built to withstand attack by Allied troops, now fading like an old movie set.

I walked 12 clifftop miles from Devil’s Hole along the north coast, then down the windy west beside a gigantic sandy beach to La Pulente, the third film location. A fantastic walk, an occasional café in craggy coves near the beach, but mostly just empty country and the occasional walker.

La Pulente is a broad beach where they filmed Dick and Fancy driving a horse and cart. But by this time I realised that it didn’t matter what went on where. The thing about visiting movie locations is that the film simply gives you a reason to be somewhere, and once you arrive you start looking beyond film scenes and star tittle-tattle.

For instance, taking a guided walk through the quiet central parish of St Lawrence with Tom Bunting, an Englishman who’s lived on Jersey for 30 years, I learnt a wealth of fascinating facts.

The small island is broken into 12 parishes, each with its honorary chief constable and a roads committee that fines people who let their verges grow too long. The honorary parish police keep a sense of local discipline. The parishes are distinctive and self-protective, part of the reason why the road signs are so hard to find or follow.

This social identity encourages a dense and eagerly articulated sense of rural place that mirrors Hardy’s old rural landscapes. There’s no graffiti and barely any litter. It’s a cliché to call the island a time-warp but it has held on to its style, and those accumulated historical roots show themselves as clean lanes, quiet roads, sensitively placed TV aerials, small fields, calm villages and fine walks.

You can still find these things on the mainland — in Dorset, even. But perhaps not so clearly. When Fancy met Dick on Jersey, they hit lucky.

Need to know

Nicholas Roe stayed at Longueville Manor (01534 725501, www.longuevillemanor.com), a Relais & Châteaux hotel, which offers three-night Under The Greenwood Tree walking breaks, visiting the film’s locations, with full board and lifts to and from walk points, from £450pp.

Further information: Jersey Tourism (01534 500777, www.jersey.com) has a series of self-guided Under the Greenwood Tree walks.

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