# Any Middle Earthlike places near you?



## Freebooter (Oct 21, 2008)

Hey y'all,
Do any of you have a special spot near where you live that reminds you of something straight out of Middle Earth and LOTR?!? I do!There is a giant hill postitioned along a line of highground overlooking the wooded valley that the Alabama River lies in. Some say the big peculiar hill is an ancient Indian Mound. Anyway, one day I drove up to its top to look around the country side and I was amazed. Below me stretched a vista straight out of LOTR! Immediately below a few hundred yards away is a big "Robt. Trent Jones" golf complex with green mounds all over it stretching aways away. Past that are the green forrests, the Alabama River, then more carpet of forrest and woods, and Montgomery shining clear and white in the distance. In another direction is a huge papermill looming up in the distance in that direction, with spires, smoke and steam always billowing and lit up like a battleship at night. 

The first time I drove up to that peaceful hill top I was shocked as I said. For below me lay not the scene described above, but the Barrow Downs, and past that the forrest and river, and beyond that the White City or perhaps Rivendale in the distance. In another direction lay Mordor, with its constant smoke and steam billowing by day and by the light of its fires by night! 

I am telling y'all, every time I go to that spot that scene reminds me so much of the LOTR it is something else! If any of you lived near here (Montgomery, Al area) I would take you to it. It might not be there for long. To either side of it and behind it they have extended shopping centers, etc, and one day might build on the hill, although there are people trying to see that that doesn't happen due to Indian Heritage.
Oh well, I just had to post about that wonderful and neat view or scene at that spot.
Take care,
Freebooter
Alabama


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## Mike (Oct 21, 2008)

Yukon River = the Anduin.


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## Illuin (Oct 23, 2008)

New York City = The dungeons of Angband


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## Prince of Cats (Oct 24, 2008)

Illuin said:


> New York City = The dungeons of Angband




The other day I was very very exhausted in the forest on the verge of mythopoetical experience and from the Oak forest it opened to a hilly plain of prairie grass and I thought of Fangorn and Rohan


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## Confusticated (Oct 20, 2010)

This is about 10 - 15 miles from where I live...



I live on the edge of a huge valley. One the other side of those hills is a mountain range. The hills look ugly during Summer because the grass is dead. But it's nice in the Spring. It could be the Shire or somethin during the green time. You'll see cows, but no elves. And if you start going into the mountains Spring sometimes a whole hillside will be golden from poppies. Which looks like this:

http://outdoorphotographermag.com/lowepro/landscape_scenic_lg_gallery.asp?start=234

Those are the state flower of California by the way.


And going up into the mountains you'll quickly pass through a few different vegetation zones, so there is a lot of variety all of it gorgeous though. Rocks, trees, snow, moss, cliffs, streams, waterfalls, mists, clouds, sunshine, bears, and giant sequoias - the biggest trees on earth, as well as redwoods the tallest trees on earth. The tall redwoods make me think of Dorthonion from the first age. To walk in the high altitude on the forest floor and look up at these giants, it feels like you are in a magical place. It just makes you feel wonderful. I've only been there twice since I discovered Middle-earth, but in all ways it reminds me of what it might have been like in Middle-earth, or in some time of the distant past. Some of the trees are thousands of years old.


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## Turgon (Nov 3, 2010)

Um... there is a Fram Street near me. Does that count?


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## Confusticated (Nov 3, 2010)

Can't say since I am not familiar with it, though speaking of streets that curry mile you mentioned must be comparable with something.

Your Middle-earth? I thnk your home must be Bag End, yes? All the books, wine, you writing, your excellent food and cooking ( especially your gravy) just to name some obvious point, see, you may be living in the greatest place of the third age...*grin*


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## Uminya (Nov 3, 2010)

The basin I live in reminds me of Mordor, because of the way the mountains are positioned. There are two long chains (though these run north/south, not east/west) closed off at one end by another chain of mountains, and in the flat plain between them, there are several inselbergs poking up all lonely-like. Additionally, at the north end, there is a large plain where a volcano erupted not long ago and paved it black, and a very large (extinct) volcano overlooks the whole place.


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## Confusticated (Nov 3, 2010)

If you ever get a picture, you should post it here.


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## Turgon (Nov 3, 2010)

Sounds pretty cool Cir, which I had an interesting place like that near me. Just endless rows of streets though... rather dull. The nearest wilderlands to me: The Peak District, reminds me very much of the Lone-lands though. Not managed to go walking there in about 10 years though. I think it's all the rocks and stones scattered about on the green hillsides beneath grey skies... very cool place.


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## Prince of Cats (Nov 3, 2010)

I work for a small municipality in a quickly developing sub-rural area. Earlier this week we discovered that we've had 8.5 acres of park land we didn't know about. I went back there, it's been left alone at least since the 70s or 80s when the houses were being built where there was before farm land. It's mostly wetland. We have many endangered birds around town as it is, such as sandhill cranes, but walking back there I was in such a chorus of nature songs. I was ready to meet Old Tom Bombadil 'a singin :*)


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## Unlimited (Apr 29, 2011)

I live right outside a place like Mirkwood and seriously wouldn't have it any other way. Problem, Gandalf and Bilbo? :*D "Mirkwood" is where I go to escape and feel free. No roads, no corporate slave jobs, just anarchy (checked by conscience, of course) and festivity. No nosy folk like there are in Hobbiton, with no place to escape (unless you have a magic ring... do you know where I can find one? PM me).


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## Erestor Arcamen (Apr 29, 2011)

Near where I live there's a little valley between some hills and there's a farm there. Minus the electrical wires, it looks like a shire-like setting since the houses are up against a hill and you only see the roof tops. Also Cooks Forest in Pa is gorgeous and the view from the Fireman's Tower looks like a look into a Mirkwood like Forest. I'll definitely get pictures next time I go and I'll post them right here!


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## Jon Lannister (Jun 30, 2011)

I live in Alentejo, Portugal, in a little village that's built on a hill. My house is almost at the top of the hill, and I have no other houses in front of my window. So, from the window of my bedroom, I see a plain. Then, some two or three miles away north, six or seven hills, and at the top of one of them, a little forest that comes from the other side to the top. It's all very green in the Winter and Spring, but in Summer and Fall, it becomes golden-like, it's very beautiful. Beyond all this, far to the North, I can see the peak of a mountain, the only one that can be seen from here of the Mountains of Portel. I have always saw it like the lands between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood, it's so beautiful. At the sunrise, the sky becomes pink and orange, and theres a light mist at the top of the hills. At that hour of the day, when it's even more beautiful, I think of it like the Barrow Downs, the Old Forest and Weather Top far in the distance :*)


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## Starbrow (Jul 7, 2011)

Sounds like a beautiful place, Jon.


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## richsabre (Feb 14, 2012)

i live in the uk lake district and the entire area is like its lifted from the books, rivers, mountians, forests, lakes, farms- it reminds me more of the trollshaws, mixed in with the shire


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## crabby (Aug 21, 2012)

i live on the Worcestershire/Shropshire border, and while we were driving through the area a friend who had come to vist me for the first time exclaimed 'its the fcuking Shire!'...

i see the rural area around the South-West of Kidderminster, to Worcester, Tenbury Wells, Ludlow and out to Clun and the Welsh Border as encompassing pretty much all of the Shire - flat(ish) agrigultural land, rolling hills, steep but still farmed valleys, and rough, exposed moorland.

i've also long seen the Stiperstones of Shropshire as having had a more than partial resemblence to the Barrow Downs, and theres a small village called Norbury in Shropshire not far (a few Km) from the main North-South road (the A49) in the English/Welsh border country...

obviously this is the area JRRT used as his template, but i think people who've not been to the area would be surprised as to quite how closely some of the locations in the books have to the feel/look of some places in this area.

oddly, more than a few people have commented how the veiw north-east from Eaglesham moor in Scotland looks like the borders of Mordor - the gas burn-off tower out near Falkirk adding a particularly demonic 'Eye of Sauron' to the whole vista...

E2A: in the Village of Bucklebury in Berkshire (home to one Catherine Middleton, now married to a Flt Lt Wales of some fame), there used to be a pub called 'The Green Dragon'. my ex-wifes family were the landlords in the late 19th century...


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## Eledhwen (Apr 28, 2013)

I live an hour's drive from Oxford. There are white horses carved into hillsides all over our county (Wiltshire), but the one that reminds me of Rohan is the Uffington White Horse; a Bronze Age hill figure on the side of a hill bearing an Iron Age Hill Fort. The whole of North Wiltshire reminds me of The Shire, with its chalk downs, villages where the houses are still thatched and the profusion of inns and pubs; but you'd expect that here, where folks are normal. 

What I didn't expect was, driving through London at the Northern end of Epping Forest (Fangorn - the pollards there all look like Ents), I saw a road sign to a village rejoicing in the name of Upshire.


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## Erestor Arcamen (Apr 28, 2013)

Pine Creek Gorge in Pennsylvania is pretty stunning too...


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## Eledhwen (May 1, 2013)

Even my fireplace reminds me of Middle-earth


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## Maiden_of Harad (May 2, 2013)

Right now, where I live is a verdant land, with rolling hills blanketed in lush grass that ripples in the wind, bright yellow and purple flowers are scattered throughout the grass, and the trees are turning from pale to dark green. Birds chatter, roses bloom, and the air is cool. So like the Shire-until 100+ degree summer comes, toasting the grass brown, baking the ground till it cracks, and heating the air like an oven  The wasps love it that hot, though.


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## Halasían (Oct 21, 2013)

So Maiden of Harad, in springtime its the Shire, but by late summer it's Mordor?

There was this place near where I used to live that had a swampy, boggy part of the little creek that had dead trees and lily pads and loud frogs at sunset, and mosquitoes by the thousands. Kinda reminded me of the Midgewater Marshes.


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## Maiden_of Harad (Oct 22, 2013)

Halasían said:


> So Maiden of Harad, in springtime its the Shire, but by late summer it's Mordor?



It's more like the borders of Ithilien closest to Mordor, not Mordor itself.


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## Halasían (Oct 25, 2013)

Maiden_of Harad said:


> It's more like the borders of Ithilien closest to Mordor, not Mordor itself.


Ah, much better then.

I was driving by a park the other day and the Jacaranda trees were all in bloom, making the cloudy gray day have a violet glow to it, especially with them dropping their flowers over the wet pavement. A very Middle Earthy look and feel. Unfortunately, my iphone doesn't have the ability to grasp the enchanting coloring.


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## Ithirahad (Apr 24, 2015)

No place here looks like Middle-Earth (Somewhere in the New Lands Illúvatar put in place of Aman when it was removed, perhaps, but we know nothing of those) but in the months that ought to be Spring, where I live tends to turn into a bad day in Nearer Harad/Khand.


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## Red Leaf (Jan 17, 2017)

I had lunch in a pub in Moreton-on-the-Marsh that it's claimed was Tolkien's inspiration for the Prancing Pony at Bree.

I'm writing this while having a lunchtime drink in the Eagle and Child, Tolkien's favourite pub in Oxford. It's very nice.

I just thought you'd like to know that...


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