Bag End

 

I’m looking for someone to share an adventure . . .

Well I am in Middle earth, it wasn’t going to be long before I found my way to The Shire. This week I’ve been staying in a place called Cambridge in the Waikato region of New Zealand’s north island and If you lean out the window of my little air bnb you could just smell the pies and cakes and second breakfasts wafting down the lanes from  Hobbiton.

My hobbit-like home in Cambridge NZ

When the location scouts for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy were searching for somewhere to be ‘The Shire’ they flew over this rural farming region with its rolling greeen fields and lush pasture. When they spotted the Alexander’s 1250 acre sheep farm with its lake, hills and valley, and they knew they had found Hobbiton.

The rolling fields of the Alexander farm Matamata

After the filming, the fake polystyrene facades of the Hobbit holes were torn down and the land left as it was found, but that didn’t stop Tolkien fans seeking out the farm and wanting to see where Hobbiton had been. The farmer obliged by doing little tours but apart from the landscape there was not much to be seen. So when The Hobbit went into production it was decided to build Hobbiton for real, so it could be a lasting legacy for the local farming community and a place everyone could visit.

So I did.

And I wasn’t disappointed. . . I joined a little tour that picks you up from Matamata information centre and drives you out to the farm, on the way the guide talks about the filming and shows short film clips on board the bus. As you enter the farm they play a greeting from Sir Peter Jackson himself, thanking you for visiting and wishing you a pleasant stay in Hobbiton. With the theme of the shire and Gandalf’s call to adventure playing in my head by the time we walked round the little lane which opens out into the Hobbit village I was fully immersed in the magic and practically in tears.

Nearly all the details are real, the vegetable gardens, fruit trees, windows, chimneys, landscaping etc… it’s like being in a book, or in this case that you’ve just climbed inside a motion picture.

I don’t think I stopped grinning.

Each Hobbit Hole was different with little props inside and out to represent the character. I decided I could have lived in any of them (well despite bumping my head the whole time) You see Hobbits live in holes in the ground:

‘Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.’

There is something quite magical walking around a Hobbiton path and turning the corner to see Bilbo (and Frodo) Baggins house Bag End. Apparently Tolkien’s Aunt Jane lived in a tiny farmhouse in Worcestershire nick named Bag End, a pun on the French cul-de-sac, literally the bottom of the bag and so he chose this for the Baggingses. The oak tree on the top of the burrow is the only ‘fake tree’ in Hobbiton and made of a steel structure. A pretty wonderful sculpture.

Bag End

From here you can look down to the lake, mill and The Green Dragon pub. For Tolkien ‘The Shire’ was meant to represent an idillyic English landscape and to help create that, extra trees and hedges had been planted on the farmland. In fact many local cattle farmers had sold entire hedges to be added to the Hobbiton hills, because as a sheep farm The Alexander’s just had simple fencing so that sheep weren’t stuck in branches and bushes. As we drove to the set you could see across the cattle fields the clear spaces where hedges had once been and then the occasional strip of hedge on its own, last hedge standing. The effect in Hobbiton however was perfect. It reminded me of the South Downs, of The Weald & Down Open Air Museum, of the view from the Earl of March across to Goodwood. It reminded me of home.

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Despite there being other tours and other groups of grinning idiots wandering round it is managed in such a way that it never felt very busy. In fact you can see from the photos despite every single grinning idiot taking a million photos each we barely got in one another’s way. Maybe because it was the last tour of the afternoon, maybe because it was Autumn but for whatever reason it was charming. Maybe more so because we got a free pint at the Green Dragon. I toasted you all.

There was no real sniggering at silly names in Hobbiton (despite Bag End and Woody End). I was glad to see on the notice board by the mill that I could ‘Fiddle Around’ with fiddle lessons from F Starpe of Midnel Delving’.

But I didn’t need to entertain myself with signs that looked like ‘Puke Bakery’ this particular afternoon. I had been transported to another place. To the Shire.

I was simply enchanted.

‘Its a dangerous business Frodo, going out of your door. You step onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to’