Walking into Other Worlds | Britain’s Real Fantasy Locations
May 20, 2026Fantasy 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.
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:
“Three miles up the River Thames from the centre of Oxford...out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow, there stood the Priory of Godstow, where the gentle nuns went about their holy business.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
“Turf had been cut away in long flowing lines, so that the bare chalk made the shape of an animal.”
The book’s most quoted exchange follows when Tiffany’s father passes on what Granny Aching told him as a boy:
“Taint what a horse looks like,” said Tiffany. “It’s what a horse be.”
Pratchett was drawn to the idea that the White Horse only exists because generations of people have continued to cut it into the hillside. Without that sustained effort, it would disappear in a matter of years – and he used this as a metaphor for how stories and beliefs can be lost once a culture stops actively maintaining them. The horse dates to between 1380 and 550 BC, making it the oldest chalk figure in Britain – considerably older than the Cerne Abbas Giant, which Uffington probably predates by over 1,500 years.
How to get there
From the High Street in Uffington village, head south and bear left onto Shotover Road. Cross the B4057 and continue to White Horse Hill Car Park, following signs to the hillfort above.
5. Great Malvern, Worcestershire – C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
The story has the quality of legend – though enough of it is documented to give it substance. On a snowy winter’s evening, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their friend George Sayer – who was head of English at Malvern College – were making their way back from a night at The Unicorn pub in Great Malvern. The town is still lit in places by Victorian gas lamps, unusual for a town of its size, and as they walked, Lewis noticed one of them glowing through the falling snow and reportedly remarked to his companions that it would make an excellent opening for a book. The lamp post in the snow-covered wood is, of course, the first thing the Pevensie children encounter when they step through the wardrobe into Narnia.
Lewis had a long connection with Malvern: he attended school there as a boy and, through his friendship with Sayer, returned regularly as an adult, walking the hills with Tolkien. The lamp in question is said to have stood near Belle Vue Terrace, close to The Unicorn. A lamp still stands on Belle Vue Island – a small, raised terrace between Belle Vue Road and Wells Road – alongside a spring and a statue of Edward Elgar. Whether it is the original lamp is unclear, but as a place to stand on a dark evening and think about wardrobes, it is hard to beat.
How to get there
To reach it, leave The Unicorn pub, turn right and walk approximately 40 metres, looking for the fork in the road.
6. York Minster – Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke’s debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, takes place in a version of early 19th-century England in which magic is believed to be extinct. In one of the book’s earliest and most memorable scenes, the reclusive magician Mr Norrell invites the ‘Learned Society of York Magicians’ to a night-time visit to York Minster. The Society, having long since given up on the real practice of magic, believes in it only theoretically – as history and concept rather than living force. Mr Norrell casts a spell, and the stone statues of kings and saints that line the minster’s great screen begin to move, blink, and speak: in archaic English, in Latin, in long-dead dialects, recounting everything they have witnessed over centuries of standing in that building.
It is easy to see where Clarke found her inspiration. York Minster is the second-largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe and one of the great medieval buildings of the world, built between roughly 1220 and 1472. Its interior is extraordinary – soaring stone columns, the widest Gothic nave in England, and an extraordinary collection of stained glass, much of it original medieval work. The kings’ screen, lined with 15 statues of English monarchs, is the kind of thing that makes you understand exactly why a novelist might decide those figures should talk.
How to get there
The Minster sits at the heart of York, just inside the old city walls. It is impossible to miss. York has park-and-ride services covering its ring road, which is the easiest option for drivers. From the train station, head up Station Road, cross the river onto Museum Street and continue straight until the Minster’s west front appears ahead of you.