Travel writer and editor Mark Jones on why you should follow the book, not the movie, when it comes to travel inspiration

Do you prefer the book or the film? It’s a difficult one to answer – unless you are a tourism chief, that is. They’ll plump for ‘film’ every time. Especially if you are a tourism chief in New Zealand, with one official, when referring to JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, descibing it as “the best unpaid advertisement that New Zealand has ever had”.

He was talking about the films made by Kiwi director Peter Jackson, which, it is said, played a big part in the growth of tourism numbers from 1.7 million to 2.4 million as the films were released. They are hoping for more with the release of Jackson’s Hobbit films. The Chronicles of Narnia movies, based on the C S Lewis novels, were also largely shot there. New Zealand, it seems, has a monopoly on the two most successful children’s fantasy ‘franchises’ of all time.

To my knowledge there has been no similar windfall for the places that really inspired Middle Earth and Narnia.

Tolkien and Lewis were friends and fellow dons between the wars at Oxford. In the summer holidays they would pack their knapsacks, fill their pipes and set off walking. It was those walks that inspired the books.

So if you really want to see Middle Earth and Narnia, take a long trek through the shires of the UK’s ‘middle west’ (Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire). Take a detour to Birmingham and what’s left of Sarehole, Tolkien’s childhood home, said to be the village that inspired Hobbiton. The nearby and sulphurous Black Country of the late 1800s provided an excellent model for Mordor.

If you carry on into Wales, you’ll encounter Narnia’s mountainous neighbour, the Archenland of Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. On the opposite side of the country is the Fenland that Lewis came to know when he transferred to Cambridge – the marshlands of The Silver Chair.

You wouldn’t normally link the words ‘New Zealand’ and ‘bare-faced cheek’. You can’t blame the Kiwis for their opportunism, but it’s high time that British tourism chiefs reclaimed Narnia and Middle Earth for their own.

Still, the book brigade has at least one victory it can claim over the moviemakers. The plain and prosaic logging town of Forks in Washington State is now packed to the rafters with teenage girls and their indulgent parents. That’s because Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight saga is set there. But if you look for the iconic movie locations, you’ll be disappointed. They were filmed hundred of miles east in Oregon – because of favourable tax breaks, apparently.

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This article has been tagged Opinion, Destination