INTREPID SURVIVORS LOCATION scout Steve Clutterbuck has tracked down the real-life location of Cawston Farm - the settlement of the doomed Dr Adams, which Greg Preston visits in third series episode The Last Laugh.

The location of the Adams' settlement is Yscir Fechan Farm, west of the village of Merthyr Cynog in Brecon, Powys. [Review the exact location on StreetMap].

Steve concedes that tracking down this important new location owed more than a little to good fortune. "The thing with this one is that I never actually set out to find it," he remembers. "My fiance and my son Jamie went on a break in the Brecons, and my only Survivors' plan was to call in on Ffrwdgrech House (from Reunion), but I got caught up with it all and we decided (well, to be truthful, I decided) to go and have a look for Cawston Farm."

"Driving near to Ffrwdgrech House I asked a couple of farm workers if they recognised any of my screenshots, but none of the suggestions that they offered proved to be right," Steve recalls.

"We headed back towards Brecon to check out some sites close to the rivers Honddu and Afon Yscir, and made for Lower Chapel.

Finding the farm was fantastic as The Last Laugh is one of my favourite episodes

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Steve Clutterbuck

We ended up taking a wrong turn down a dead-end farm track, but when the farmer pulled up on his quad bike I showed him the screen captures and he came up with another possible location."

That also proved to be a false lead, but when Steve met up with the farmer again he introduced him to another local resident. "He said he didn't recognise the place, but said that he would go and show the pictures to his uncle, who had lived in the area for years."

"When he came back, his uncle had circled a possible spot on the map. We headed towards it, and there it was after all these years - Cawston Farm!"

Steve was delighted with the find. "Well worth the five hours of driving around looking for it," he says. "Finding the farm was fantastic. The Last Laugh is one of my favourite episodes, and the fact that this was written by actor Ian McCulloch makes this discovery pretty special."

"I am glad to be able to report that the barn where Dr Adams was living is still there," he adds. "Even those wooden steps leading up to Adams' room have survived. It is sad to see that the cottage has long gone and been replaced with a modern building, but it didn't look in a very good state in 1977 - with tiles missing and with Greg making it worse by kicking out the windows."

Best of all for Steve and his family was that, unlike Greg Preston in the 1977 Survivors' storyline, they all "managed to get out of the place without catching smallpox!"

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