Outlander season 3 notes: Ships, South Africa, and Scotland

The news has been a little bit lighter on the Outlander front these days — this does often tend to happen during filming! The cast members can’t quite be doing a whole lot of other stuff during production, and it’s a rather quiet set in terms of news for the press.

Hopefully, this latest edition of Outlander season 3 notes will keep you informed on the latest. Personally, we do think it offers up a couple of interesting news items, starting with the overall impact that the series has on its primary filming location of Scotland. There’s a great piece over in the Scotsman that shows that audience figures through many of the top tourist attractions in the country are up a good 15% from prior years. One of the big reasons for that clearly seems to be the presence of the hit Starz series filming in the country. The Doune and Blackness castles specifically saw traffic increase by more than a third in the past year.

All of this serves as a further reminder that filming on location can produce tremendous benefits both for the series (it creates a sense of authenticity), and for the places that allow the production to set up shop. That’s why it can be important for certain places to offer tax breaks to film productions to work there. It employs people from the local economy, and if the end product is good, there’s a good chance that the production will lure in tourists later.

We could get up on a soapbox about this further railing against states / countries declining production tax breaks, but for let’s just be grateful that this is not an issue that Outlander itself has had to face.

Who’s heading off to South Africa?

It’s none other than series author Diana Gabaldon! She posted on Twitter recently that she will be soon taking off to the very country where the show is currently filming. (They wrapped up in Scotland many weeks ago.) For her, we must imagine that it is a thing of beauty seeing a real-life visualization of everything that she once described in the books. These sort of moments are reminders that without her work, we would not have this great series in the first place.

Finally, a quick look at a ship

It may be a tiny tease, but the Outlander TV News Twitter account shared a brief image of one of the ships that will be coming up on season 3. You can check this out over at the link here — originally, it was shared on an Instagram story via actor César Domboy. Filming on these ships is one of the reasons why Outlander is filming in South Africa in the first place — this will help to further capture the journey of Jamie and Claire Fraser from Scotland over to Jamaica.

Final reminder

Outlander is currently taking part in our TV Madness Tournament, and it’s in the final four! You can vote on it until 9:00 a.m. Pacific time on March 28 over at the link here. (Photo: Starz.)