Toft, Cambridgeshire

Go village hopping across an unusually undulating corner of Cambridgeshire, peppered with historic churches.

JRR Tolkien’s classic The Hobbit was published 80 years ago this month and you can celebrate by walking some of the landscapes believed to have inspired his writing.

The Shire

Tolkien was born in South Africa but from the age of four he grew up in Birmingham and spent part of his youth in

Sarehole, which he told a newspaper at the time was his inspiration for Bilbo’s home: The Shire. You can walk local nature reserves (including Moseley Bog and Billesley Common) and visit Sarehole Mill.

Hobbiton

As professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University in 1929, Tolkien visited an archaeological dig on a Roman Temple at Lydney

Park in the Forest of Dean. The site featured tunnels and holes in the hillside that some believe were the inspiration for Hobbiton.

The White Mountains

Tolkien walked the Great Malvern Hills with his friend George Sayer, who remembers the author comparing parts of the landscape with the White Mountains that separated the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor in his books.