Long before I had any working sense of the industrial miracle of cinema, I was effectively dropped straight into Middle-earth by two parents who decided that one of my earliest cultural inheritance would be The Lord of the Rings. The strange thing about those early childhood memories is how they often feel suspended in a dream-like melange of images detached from chronology. Yet the impeccable clarity with which I could recall the rattle of Gandalf’s cart rolling in the Shire, the curl of smoke from Bilbo’s pipe or the serene image of Frodo reading under a tree, blurred the lines between scenes I had watched and memories of a place I felt I had actually once occupied. Which is why, when the universe presented me with the chance to travel halfway across the planet to a very special sheep farm in New Zealand, it felt like every decision in my life had been bending toward this single once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fully realise those half-realities. So I accepted the premise with full awareness of how unreal it sounded and allowed myself the small indulgence of framing it exactly as it deserved to be framed: I was going on an adventure. For both J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal high fantasy novels and Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptations, The Shire is where it all began. When Jackson went looking for it in 1998, the place needed to feel untouched by time, which is how a helicopter survey over Waikato landed his team on the Alexander family’s sheep farm — a 1,250-acre spread near Matamata. Legend has it that location scout David Comer, dropped in unannounced and interrupted an important rugby match to pitch a fantasy film to the owner, Ian Alexander, and somehow that conversation led to nine months of construction beginning in 1999. The New Zealand Army was drafted in to cut roads and move earth while crews built Hobbit-hole façades into the hills and planted gardens. When filming wrapped, the set was meant to disappear, but weather stalled the teardown and those leftover fragments nudged the site into public tours by 2002, and eventually into a full rebuild when Jackson returned for The Hobbit film trilogy; this time using permanent materials and obsessive detail so nothing would need to be faked again. Hobbiton now sits a couple of hours from Auckland, as one of New Zealand’s most sought after experiences that thousands travel across the world to visit, every year.