Distance: 6.5 miles / 10.5 kilometres
Total ascent: 250 feet / 76 metres
Walking time: 2.5 to 3 hours
From the entrance to the car park of the Lygon Arms in Feckenham, proceed southwards along the footpath for around 80 metres. At the end of the car park, go through the metal gate and cross the track beyond. Continue along the footpath for another 100 metres, at first along the edge of a field and then through a patch of scrubby trees enclosed by two gates. Here, cross another stony track, climb a stile and continue on the same footpath for 100 metres. Beyond the next stile, the footpath keeps to the left of a fence for 110 metres. Keep to the right of the dilapidated buildings of Merry Oak Farm and walk 160 metres to the north-west corner of a wood. Continue straight along the path through the wood for 230 metres until reaching a plank bridge and a track for motor vehicles.
Turn right onto the driveway of Bean Hall Mill and follow it south-westwards for 200 metres to the edge of the wood, where it crosses the Bow Brook. Keep going along the driveway for another 250 metres as it crosses an open field and then the Brandon Brook. As Bean Hall Mill comes into sight, leave the driveway by turning left onto a footpath which skirts the field to the south of the buildings for about 250 metres. At this point a gate on your right admits you to a bridleway which will take you for 1.4 km in the direction of Morton Underhill. Upon reaching the hamlet, turn right and walk southwards for 200 metres, initially passing a pond on your right.
In The Hobbit, the name of Bilbo Baggins’s house often appears in conjunction with that of its neighbourhood: as ‘Bag-End, Under-hill’. ‘Underhill’ also features prominently in The Lord of the Rings, not only as place-name but as the alias which Frodo uses in an attempt to travel incognito. Morton Underhill, a settlement that lies within two miles of the real Bag End, is therefore one possible source for this name in Tolkien’s fiction.
After Morton House (the last house on your right), go through the metal gate to the left of a stile. [At the time of writing, the sign here had decayed and toppled over.] Follow the footpath westwards, along the left side of the hedgerow and ditch, for 600 metres; and then for 600 metres south-westwards. The original path (as marked on O.S. maps) is no longer obvious, however Earls Common Road can easily be reached via the entrance to a house called Stockwood Thatch, opposite the junction with Stockwood Lane. From this ‘crossroads’, the hamlet of Stock Green lies 1.6 km along the road to your right; that of Stock Wood is immediately ahead and to your left.
The village called Stock in The Lord of the Rings is situated on the causeway between the Brandywine Bridge and the Bucklebury Ferry. It is where the narrow road through the Green Hills ends and is well-known in the Shire for The Golden Perch inn, which Pippin wishes to visit. Whether these two Worcestershire hamlets on the doorstep of the real Bag End contributed at all to the fictional name is hard to say. ‘Stock’ is a common toponym in English, derived either from stocc, an Anglo-Saxon word referring to the remainder of a tree/woodland after felling, or stok, which denoted a subsidiary settlement.
Cross over Earls Common Road and proceed up Stockwood Lane for 150 metres. Where Stockwood Lane bends left, continue straight and climb the gate leading to two footpaths. Take the lefthand footpath, which runs beside a hedgerow for 200 metres, and then turn right onto a track. After 100 metres, the track meets the lane to Stockwood Lodge Farm. Turn left and follow the lane for 250 metres as it bends right and skirts the south side of the farm. At the south-west corner of the farm, continue in the same direction as the lane becomes a bridleway across a field. After a further 270 metres, at the thin tree-line on the far side of the field, continue along the bridleway as it turns a little to the right and makes for the south-east corner of Roundhill Wood.
Ignoring the other paths which branch off to the right of the wood, follow the bridleway as it turns left and skirts the south-eastern edge of Roundhill Wood for 1 km. (After 250 metres, you may decide to strike out across the field on your left, aiming for the corner of the wood.) At the southernmost tip of Roundhill Wood, turn left onto the track which becomes Church Lane, Dormston. Proceed for 500 metres, past St Nicholas’s Church on your left, as far as the junction with Dormston Lane.
On your left are the two workers’ cottages retained by Tolkien’s aunt, Emily Jane Neave (1872-1963), after she was obliged to sell Bag End Farm in 1931. She leased one and lived in the other, Church Cottage. After spells in Essex, near the retreat house of the Catholic mystic Evelyn Underhill (that name again), and in Kent, Jane returned to Church Cottage in 1937. She remained living there throughout the Second World War, vacating it in 1947 at the age of seventy-five. In a subsequent letter to her great-nephew Oliver Suffield (1934-2006), she remembered the latter period as ‘the happy days we used to have together, making bonfires and chasing cows’.
Turn left onto Dormston Lane and follow it for 100 metres as it bends right. Just before a track branches right to Dormston Manor Farm or ‘Bag End’, go through the gate on your left. Take the righthand of two paths, which diverges slightly from the angle of the driveway to bring you past the north-eastern corner of the farm.
This is Dormston Manor, the farm purchased by Jane Neave in 1923. She restored to the sixteenth-century house its former name of Bag End, which she discovered on some old documents hidden in a chest. The name was recycled in turn by Tolkien as the address of his Hobbit protagonists, as he admitted in a letter of 1968: ‘In the case of Bag-End, I did not invent it; it was, in fact, the local name for a house an aunt lived in in Worcestershire: an old tumbledown manor house at the end of an untidy lane that led nowhere else.’
Tolkien stayed in Dormston on at least two occasions: in 1923 and again, later in the same decade, with one or more of his children. A more regular guest at Bag End was his brother Hilary, whom Jane had helped establish on a fruit farm in Blackminster, ten miles to the south-east. Tolkien’s grandfather also spent much of the last seven years of his life at Bag End. Indeed, it was here, in September 1930, that John Suffield died at the age of ninety-seven. That spring, the sprightly nonagenarian had mown a large lawn and afterwards ‘sat in the wind without a jacket’. He seems never to have recovered from the resultant chill.
Also helping on the farm was one of Jane’s former school pupils, Edith Marjorie Attlee (1900-1985). She married one of Tolkien’s cousins, Frank Sydney Suffield (1904-1958), and remained close to Jane after Bag End was sold in the straitened circumstances of the Great Depression. During her final years, Jane went to live with Marjorie: first, at Newnham in Warwickshire, and then in the remote and beautiful Welsh village of Gilfachrheda, where she died in 1963.
Continue to the south-eastern corner of the field and join the track which runs eastwards from the farm. As soon as you have passed through the hedgerow, turn off the track and into the field on your left. Walk uphill and parallel to the track (on the left side of the tree-line) for 50 metres.
On your right is the ‘Tolkien Oak’, a Tree of National Special Interest, which is suggestive (by virtue of its great age, size and hollowness) of the ‘huge hulk of a tree’ in which the hobbits eat their dinner on the second evening of their journey. You can access its record in the Ancient Tree Inventory here.
Continue along the northern side of the hedge-line for a further 500 metres, at which point the path merges with a bridleway. Proceed eastwards along this bridleway, with Berrowsfield Farm on your left, for a further 600 metres, until you reach the lane that traverses Broadclose Farm. Continue along Broadclose Lane, through the farm and towards Inkberrow for 700 metres. At the junction with Withybed Lane, go straight over and up Stonepit Lane for another 200 metres.
Inkberrow could be seen as equivalent to Woodhall, the village beneath the ‘shoulder of hills’ where the hobbits are hosted by the Elves on the second night of their journey. Frodo believes that Woodhall is around ‘eighteen miles … in a straight line’ from the Bucklebury Ferry. This tallies with the (nearly) nine miles that separate Inkberrow from the Hampton Ferry, given that the Shire distances tend to harmonise with the West Midlands at a scale of two-to-one. However, there are also disparities and I have chosen to associate the hills above Woodhall with the scenery of the Lenches, further south.
Continue eastwards along Stonepit Lane for 350 metres until it meets Inkberrow High Street and then turn left. Walk 100 metres to Inkberrow village green, where Leg 2C and Stage 2 of The Shire Way end.
NEXT: Stage 3 of The Shire Way