Walking into Other Worlds | Britain’s Real Fantasy Locations
From a chalk horse cut into Oxfordshire hillside to a Pembrokeshire beach scattered with painted pebbles, Britain is full of places where real and imagined worlds collide. Here are six locations that inspired some of fiction’s greatest fantasy writers.
Fantasy doesn’t always take shape entirely on the page. Sometimes, it begins somewhere specific – a doorway flanked by ancient yews, a gas lamp glowing through falling snow, a chalk horse cut into a hillside so old that even the people who made it are lost to time. Britain has an unusual density of these threshold places: landscapes and buildings that seem to exist on the edge of something else, that have been quietly feeding the imagination of novelists for generations. Philip Pullman projected Lyra Belacqua’s Oxford almost street for street onto the real one. C.S. Lewis saw a Victorian lamp post and invented Narnia. Terry Pratchett moved to the rolling downs of Southern England and found a chalk horse that became a metaphor for memory itself. These six locations are the real-world coordinates of some of fiction’s most beloved other worlds – and, beguilingly, you can still visit all of them.
A bird's eye view of Oxford, the ‘city of dreaming spires’ that inspired much of Philip Pullman’s work. Pictured is the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, opposite the Radcliffe Camera.
1. Godstow Abbey, Oxfordshire – Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials
In the opening pages of La Belle Sauvage, the first book in the Book of Dust trilogy, Philip Pullman describes Godstow Priory as sitting:
Much of the initial action of the book centres around Godstow Priory and The Trout Inn, real locations on the edge of Port Meadow on Oxford’s north-western fringe. Pullman has lived in Oxford since his student days in the 1970s, and although Lyra’s world is a parallel one, most of it maps directly onto the city he knows. Visitors can have a pint at The Trout, walk the ruins of the Priory, or make the short detour into Oxford to the Pitt Rivers Museum, whose eclectic collection of ethnographic artefacts inspired many of those in Pullman’s alternative world.
The remains of Godstow Abbey at golden hour; the medieval nunnery that Philip Pullman transplanted almost unchanged into the pages of ‘La Belle Sauvage’. Founded in 1133, it was here that Fair Rosamund, mistress of Henry II, was buried.
Godstow was founded in 1133 by Edith of Winchester, the widow of Sir William Launceline, built on a small island between two streams feeding the Thames – or the Isis, as it is known in Oxford. It would have been a haven from the world, its inhabitants going about their devotions undisturbed. The priory is perhaps best remembered as the burial place of Fair Rosamund, a mistress of King Henry II. Legend cast her as a temptress eventually poisoned by Queen Eleanor – but the truth is rather less dramatic. Eleanor was imprisoned for plotting against the King at the time of Rosamund’s death, making the poisoning story impossible. She almost certainly died of illness, and what existed between her and Henry was very likely a consensual relationship rather than the seduction of popular legend.
How to get there
The priory is a short walk from central Oxford. From Jericho, follow Walton Well Road opposite the Victoria Inn down to Port Meadow, then take the Thames Path north, crossing the bridge to the ruin. The area can flood in winter, but the morning mists rising from the meadow only add to the atmosphere.
Dobby's grave at Freshwater East in Pembrokeshire – a fan-built mound of painted stones and single socks that grows a little larger every year. The beach doubled as Shell Cottage in the Harry Potter films and has become one of the most quietly moving literary pilgrimage sites in Britain.
2. Freshwater East, Pembrokeshire – J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter
For the uninitiated: Dobby was a house-elf, a magical servant bound to the Malfoy family. Harry Potter tricks Lucius Malfoy into freeing him by presenting him with a sock – because if a house-elf receives clothing, their servitude ends. Dobby goes on to work at Hogwarts, becoming one of Harry’s most devoted friends. When he dies, Harry decides to bury him by hand, without magic, in the garden of Shell Cottage. In the books, Shell Cottage is in Tinworth, described as a Cornish village – but the filmmakers instead chose Freshwater East, a sandy bay in Pembrokeshire between Tenby and Broad Haven.
What started as a temporary film set has become a genuine pilgrimage site. The cottage is long gone, but the grave grows each year. On any given visit you will find a mound of painted stones and single socks left by fans from around the world – the pile has grown large enough that a second is forming nearby. Environmentally, though, the synthetic socks are a concern, amounting to plastic waste in a National Trust location. Visitors are encouraged to bring only natural-fibre socks or, better still, just a stone.
How to get there
Freshwater East is south of Pembroke, off the B4319. The National Trust car park has toilets and a recycling area. The grave is a five-minute walk through the dunes.
The north door of St Edward's Church, Stow-on-the-Wold – the doorway said to have inspired Tolkien's Doors of Durin in ‘The Lord of the Rings’. The two ancient yew trees have grown so tightly around the medieval stonework that tree and church have become inseparable.
3. St Edward’s Church, Stow-on-the-Wold – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
The north doorway of St Edward’s Church in Stow-on-the-Wold is one of Britain’s most visited church entrances – a medieval studded door flanked by two vast, knotted yew trees whose roots have grown around the stone over centuries. The claim is that Tolkien saw this doorway and used it as the inspiration for the Doors of Durin, the West Gate of the Dwarven Kingdom of Moria in The Lord of the Rings.
Whether or not the claim is strictly true is a matter of debate: Tolkien did have a brother living in Evesham, just a few miles away, and the pair met regularly in nearby Moreton-in-Marsh, making a visit very plausible. But his original sketches of the Doors of Durin look markedly different from the Stow doorway, and no direct evidence exists to confirm the connection. The yews, for their part, are most likely 16th-century saplings, planted when the porch was remodelled – young by Tolkien’s standards, let alone by the church’s own 13th-century foundations. None of that has dampened its appeal. In peak season the churchyard fills with fans from around the world, all queuing for the same photograph.
How to get there
From Stow’s Market Square, with The King’s Arms pub behind you, head to the left corner and turn down Church Street into the churchyard.
The Uffington White Horse, seen from the air — the only angle from which its full abstract shape makes sense. Dating to between 1380 and 550 BC, it is the oldest chalk figure in Britain, and the hill below it is Dragon Hill, said to be where St George slew the dragon.
4. Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire – Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
Terry Pratchett moved to Wiltshire in the early 1990s, and the chalk downlands of southern England – just across the county border into Oxfordshire at Uffington – clearly fed his imagination as he wrote the Tiffany Aching novels. The five-book series is set in a mythical realm called the Chalk: green rolling hills underlain by chalk and flint, a landscape where the ancient and the everyday sit side by side. In the second book, A Hat Full of Sky, Pratchett’s chalk horse enters the story directly:
Dave Hamilton is a writer, photographer, forager and explorer of historic sites and natural places. He is the author of multiple books, including "Where the Wild Things Grow: the Foragers Guide to the Landscape", “Wild Ruins” and “Wild Ruins BC”. His latest book, “Weird Guide Britain”, published by Wild Things Publishing, is out in May 2026.
