The captain has been a fan of Lord of The Rings for many years. He has read all of the books, and every Christmas, he watches the full series. The admiral enjoys all of them, but after 5-6 Christmases watching them in a row, she bailed out of the annual watching scheme.
Even so, there were two eager beavers who had booked a half day excursion to Hobbiton. This is where Bags End in The Shire (where the Hobbits live), was filmed for all of the movies.
The location is actually on a family’s farm, and it is still an active sheep farm. After shooting the last three Hobbit movies, they decided to keep the set on location (it was tore down after the previous movies), and open it to the public.
This is certainly a huge venture, with people from all over the world booking their visits many months in advance. They can host as many as 3,000 visitors per day, and more than half a million people visit every year.
Every 10th minute, there is a group of twenty people who are bussed onto the set. A knowledgeable guide (we had a fan who had been visiting two years earlier and decided not to leave) took us through a very entertaining tour around the village. Driving towards the set, we got a fun proof that this is still an operational farm, as we experienced a traffic jam made by sheep.
As we entered the set, we were immediately incredibly impressed with how big it was, and how it looked exactly like the movies.
As we started to walk around the village, we followed dirt pathways and were amused by everything we saw along the way.
The houses were all made in different sizes, and we learned how the movie makers used angles and the different sized houses to give the illusion that the hobbits were much smaller than the average man.
We enjoyed looking at all the small details they had embedded, and were told they have a big crew just working on maintaining all of the set decorations, like the clothes hanging out to dry, or the tools at the fisherman, carpenter or blacksmith houses.
On the top of the village, was the most famous house of them all, Bilbo Baggins’ house, where Frodo also lived. It had beautiful views of the entire village, and we were so amused to see the “No admittance except on party business” sign on the front door, that we had to get one ourselves for our future tiki bar we are planning to build in our mountain home.
Since a couple of years ago, they have further developed the experience, and now allow visitors into one of the houses. We definitely had to mind our heads as we moved through an impressive amount of artifacts. Since this is not a museum, we were allowed to interact with the items on display.
The last part of the tour entailed a visit to the Dragon’s Inn, also used in the movie. We were treated to a cider or home brewed beer, and enjoyed hanging out by the beautiful lake with ducks and black swans on it.
We left Hobbiton really impressed. It was so different from visiting an amusement park or other similar type of experience. We were on a family’s private land, and it was quaint, familiar and so well done. Even the somewhat dorky video message from the movie’s director, Peter Jackson, on the bus traveling out from the set, felt genuine and real.
We’d return and do it again in a heartbeat!
Visit the Hobbiton Movie Set website.