A Tolkien trail: Where to find the real-life Middle-earth

While Tolkien's stories take place in the fictional realm of Middle-earth, the awe-inspiring landscapes of the books, films and TV shows are closer than you might imagine.

The first book in J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, was released 70 years ago, in the summer of 1954. However, that's not the only recent milestone for Tolkien's legendarium: the second season of the epic TV series, The Rings of Power, was  released on 29 August 2024.   

As befits the ultimate epic fantasy series, the settings are gorgeous, ranging from bucolic, rolling countryside to plunging valleys and desolate deserts. And while Tolkien's stories take place in the fictional realm of Middle-earth, the awe-inspiring landscapes of the books, films and TV shows are not as otherworldly as you might imagine. Many of them are based on real-world locations and visiting them brings to life both the landscapes themselves and the imaginary worlds they inspired Tolkien to create.

While writing The Lord of the Rings in the 1940s, Tolkien lived for a while at Stonyhurst College, a prestigious boarding school in Lancashire where his son was a teacher. The elder Tolkien was known to walk often through the woodlands and rolling hills of the surrounding Ribble Valley, and is thought to have taken inspiration from the place while creating the Shire, the rural homeland of the hobbits.

Today, fans can explore the area on the Tolkien Trail, which opened in 2002 and takes hikers through the very landscapes that inspired the author. The route starts in the village of Hurst Green at the atmospheric 17th-Century Shireburn Arms pub, where Tolkien was a regular. It then winds for around seven easy miles through undulating farmland, past the grand buildings of Stonyhurst College, and across historic landmarks like Cromwell's Bridge, an overgrown packhorse bridge once used by Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War.

Although Tolkien didn't directly document the influence of places along the trail, there are several sources of likely inspiration. The route passes the stately home Hacking Hall where, during Tolkien's time, there was a wooden ferry barge, the Hacking Ferry, that carried people across the River Ribble. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the Bucklebury Ferry (also outside a stately home, Brandy Hall) carries the hobbits across the Brandywine River in similar fashion while they are fleeing a fearsome spectral horseman.

The local landowning family near Stonyhurst, meanwhile, were called the Shireburns – and the similarly named River Shirebourne appears in Tolkien's geography of Middle-earth. Tolkien's maps, meanwhile, depict the convergence of three rivers – the Shirebourne, Withywindle and Brandywine – in a way that exactly mirrors the meeting of the Hodder, Ribble and Calder rivers here in Lancashire. In addition, St Mary's Church in the nearby village of Newchurch-in-Pendle bears an unusual feature: an eye-shaped carving halfway up the tower, known as the Eye of God, which resembles the all-seeing Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings books and movies.

Most of the real-life places associated with Tolkien's imaginings of Middle-earth are based on educated guesswork, but there is one place that the writer himself confirmed as a real-life inspiration for The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien and his wife Edith married in 1916, and honeymooned in the Somerset village of Clevedon. While they were there, they paid a visit to one of the most jaw-dropping landscapes in Britain: Cheddar Gorge, a sheer limestone valley, pockmarked with caves whose walls are bejewelled with intricate rock formations, stalagmites and stalactites.

The honeymooning author – always married, at least in part, to his work – was taking notes, and in 1971 he confirmed in a private letter (published in 1981 as part of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien) that the caves of Cheddar Gorge inspired the Glittering Caves of Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings.

Visit Gough Cave, the most famous of the caves at Cheddar, and you'll likely recognise elements of Tolkien's description of the Glittering Caves: "columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose … fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms".

LOTR mega-fans will instantly recognise Denize Bluffs, an area of soaring rock formations and wild bush on New Zealand's North Island. In the films, this landscape features in the prequel movie The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey as the Trollshaws, a hillside forest where Bilbo Baggins encounters some hostile trolls. In the TV show, meanwhile, Denize Bluffs serves as part of the highland home of the Harfoots, the series' hobbit protagonists.

In reality, Denize Bluffs sits on a privately owned sheep and cattle farm that has been in the same family for three generations. Current stewards Warrick and Suzie Denize are very proud of the Lord of the Rings association, and now run Hairy Feet Waitomo: tours of the property that take in the various locations seen in the films and TV shows and bring them to life with showbiz tales from the production. Tours must be booked in advance. The farm can be found around eight miles west of the town of Piopio.

Tolkien was a deeply religious man, and although he always refuted the theory that The Lord of the Rings was a Christian allegory, the work is infused with spirituality. Tolkien spent his professional life as a professor at the University of Oxford, and he was known to have often visited the nearby Cotswolds, a picturesque area of golden-stone villages, gently rolling hills and seriously photogenic churches.

One of those churches, St Edward's Church in the market town of Stow-on-the-Wold, has long been earmarked as a likely source of inspiration for Tolkien. Its north door is among the most photographed doors in the country: carved from heavy, studded wood, crowned with an arching architrave and hung with an oil lamp. Its most striking feature is the two yew trees that flank the doorway, planted three centuries ago and now huge, twisted and gnarled, having grown into the structure of the church itself.

Tolkien accompanied his writings with beautiful hand-drawn artworks, one of which depicts the Doors of Durin, a hidden entrance to the inside of a mountain that harbours the Dwarf city of Khazad-dûm. Tolkien’s drawing, although stylised, is almost identical to the north door of St Edward's Church, from the trees that bookmark the entrance to the lamp that hangs above it – giving rise to the longstanding rumour that this is where he found inspiration for his mythical mountain doors.

The moon-like deserts of Tenerife feature prominently in the new series of The Rings of Power, as a barren wasteland through which the mysterious Stranger, a wizard who has lost his memory, is travelling with two hobbits. Tenerife's Indigenous Guanche people traditionally believed that Teide was the gateway to the underworld domain of malevolent deity Guayota – and it's not hard to see why, with its fierce winds, searing heat and dusty plains dotted with gnarled, skeletal trees. It's unsurprising that Teide was chosen as the real-life setting for the realm of Rhûn, which, in Tolkien's works, is a mysterious region of moral corruption and dark sorcery.

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Mount Teide is an active volcano (it hasn't erupted since 1909) and volcano treks are a popular activity in the park – although there is also a cable car if you're feeling less adventurous.

The entire The Lord of the Rings film series was famously shot in New Zealand, the homeland of director Peter Jackson. The rivers and woodlands of Fiordland – a region of green-sloped, snow-capped mountains that plunge to glacier-carved inlets, known as "sounds" – feature prominently in the movies. This is New Zealand's most unspoilt and biodiverse region, so it's no surprise Jackson chose it to represent some of the wildest parts of Middle-earth.

The woodlands of Fiordland doubled as Fangorn Forest, home to the mysterious Ents: giant talking trees who help the hobbits in their fight against the dark wizard, Saruman. Other Fiordland locations that appear in the films include the Waiau River, which stood in for Tolkien's River Anduin, the longest river in Middle-earth, that appears in the very first aerial shot of The Fellowship of the Ring.

To explore Fiordland, most visitors base themselves in the lakeside town of Te Anau, home to a wide range of hotels, restaurants and tour operators leading hiking and boating trips into the Fiordland National Park.

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