30 The Chronicle
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MONDAY, JUNE 26, 2017
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MONDAY, JUNE 26, 2017
get away
magical h istory tour
I
’M being bowed to by an animatronic hippogriff. And not just any old hippogriff, but Buckbeak – Hagrid’s Buckbeak. He twitches and tilts his head at me, before stretching his neck magisterially towards the floor, the thousands of individually hand-glued feathers covering his mechanised body as malleable and shimmering as iridescent rainbow streaks in an oily puddle. Aged 28 and standing in the otherworldly twilight of the Warner Bros. Studio Tour’s ‘Making of Harry Potter’ Forbidden Forest, flanked by 12-foot-wide faux-mossy tree The Knight bus trunks, it’s impossible not to be mesmerised by the horse-sized robot. But my eight-year-old self? She would have lost her mind. From 1997 onwards, I did all of my growing up with Harry, Ron and Hermione, surviving a not-so magical comprehensive while they went to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft And Wizardry, and saved us muggles from the wrath of Voldemort. This week, it’s 20 years since Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone originally hit book shelves, so I’m on a Potter pilgrimage to discover the locations Ella takes a that appeared in the broomstick subsequent film lesson adaptations. Leavesden studios, just a 15-minute (Knight) bus ride which, in this collapsed and from Watford station, is the Hollyconfounding geographical remapwood rendering of Rowling’s dazzling imagination, a storehouse of ping of the wizarding world, is found trinkets, wigs, sets and artefacts from next to the potions room, where drifts of cloudy bell jars swim with all eight films. Three hulking, dubious, tangled substances. malevolent wizard chessmen However enchanting and impres(competitors in Ron’s deadly match in the first movie) stand guard in the sive it is to see ‘behind the scenes’, it does somewhat dampen the magic to car park. Dripping rust, the knight lugging a be constantly reminded of the spiked ball and chain, is poised to let distinct, graspable line between fiction and reality. it fly as visitors – lightning bolts Look up from Professor Snape’s scrawled on their foreheads to match robes, which hang upsettingly Harry’s Voldemort inflicted scar – motionless beside Professor pose giddily beneath. Inside is as crammed and higgledy- Dumbledore’s in the overwhelming expanse of the Great Hall, and an piggledy as the Weasley’s Burrow,
Feel like Harry on the Hogwarts Express with a steam train ride from Goathland station, above
Dumbledore and Snape’s costumes at Leavesden Studios, above. Below: a model used by the film’s art department
It’s 20 years since Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone was first published. ELLA WALKER flies off on a bewitching tour of the Potter filming locations
holiday deals
escape plans Fancy getting away from it all? We’ve rounded up our pick of the top destinations on offer from travel agents
■■Live celebrity chef discussions, fish filleting demonstrations and the taste of great seafood is what you can expect with a weekend at the Dorset Seafood Festival, July 8-9, taking place around Weymouth’s historic harbour. If you fancy the festival you could stay at Wareham Forest Lodge Retreat, Dorset, exploring
Weymouth Harbour
exposed ribcage of a ceiling, spiked through with scaffolding, gapes wide where Rowling’s enchanted sky ought to be. A series of beautiful architectural blueprints and model sets, including an intricate matchstick dummy of the owlery, where itty-bitty illustrated owls sit, ready and waiting to deliver wizarding mail, reveal the films’ skeletal frames, while the hundreds of peeling wand boxes that buttress the windows of Ollivanders store, we’re told, were each painstakingly hand-labelled by set dressers (not wand-makers). At Alnwick Castle, an hour’s drive north of Newcastle – its bulky Norman walls the scuffed gold-black
the miles of forest on your doorstep or head to Poole or Bournemouth for some seaside fun. A three-night weekend break, starting on July 7 for up to four people costs £412 (was £504). See hoseasons.co.uk or call 0345 498 6130. ■■Thomson offers seven-night holidays to Mexico staying at Thomson’s 5T TUI Sensatori Resort Azul Mexico on an all-inclusive basis from £1,329 per person. Price is based on two adults sharing and includes flights from Newcastle airport on July 20 and transfers. To find out more or to book visit your local Thomson travel shop, see thomson.co.uk or call 0871 230 2555.
of an old pound coin – the line between living the magic and just looking, is brilliantly disguised. Instead of obeying ‘Keep off the grass’ signs, budding Quidditch players (ahem, me included) run amok on the frog-green lawns (broomstick training sessions are free, but it’s wise to book in advance), mimicking Harry’s fateful first flying lesson with Madam Hooch, which was filmed in the castle’s outer bailey. The blocky inner bailey is also where, in The Chamber Of Secrets, Harry and Ron crash Mr Weasley’s cerulean flight-enabled Ford Anglia. There’s no stately stuffiness at Alnwick, partly because it’s still a home, not a monument. Owner
■■travel from Manchester to Miami on August 13, from £1,229pp based on two adults sharing. Stay seven nights at the 3* Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort, Miami, followed by seven nights at the 2* Quality Inn & Suites, Sarasota, both on a room-only basis. This offer includes economy car hire for 14 days and return flights with Thomas Cook. Call 0207 939 775 or see ocean-florida.co.uk ■■First Choice offers seven-night holidays to Majorca staying at the 3Sun Globales Mimosa, all-inclusive, from £403 per person. Price is based on two adults sharing and includes flights from Birmingham airport on July 5 and transfers. See firstchoice.co.uk or call 0871 200 7799.
Ella Walker at Alnwick Castle Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland, lives here with his family (October to March, for the hunting season, of course), and the evidence is everywhere. Furry bean bags for the dogs fan out in front of an incongruently huge flatscreen TV in the ornate, gilded library, while in the drawing room, cast your eyes up and away from two wildly valuable 17th century Cucci Cabinets that once stood in the Palace of Versailles (“France wants them back,” our guide says archly), and there’s a set of floodlights for playing ping-pong... Following a breakfast of eggs and bacon that Hogwarts’ house-elves would be proud of at the Hog’s Head Majorca
Inn, Alnwick, the fourth wall slips even further in Durham City. We turn the corner on cobbled Owengate, calves aching from the climb, and the thickset Norman Cathedral surges into view. It’s bulky and deeply rooted, its bricks stacked, crenellated and crinkly, like sandy corrugated card. When developing how the ‘Hollywood’ Hogwarts would look, the designers simply copied and pasted Durham Cathedral’s main tower, but it’s the 15th century cloisters that make you feel as though you’re really walking the
wizarding school’s corridors. What became, on celluloid, a snowy quadrant where Harry releases his owl Hedwig, on a blustery Northumberland morning is a lush square, ablaze with sunlight, enclosed by flagstones and the ghosts of the Benedictine monks that lived here before Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. I swoosh up and down, my imaginary robes whirling as I turn each corner of the square – all that’s missing is the scratch of a striped Gryffindor scarf around my neck.
need to know ■■ Ella Walker was a guest of VisitEngland and stayed at the Hog’s Head Inn, Alnwick (hogsheadinnalnwick.co.uk; B&B from £114.95) and Raithwaite Hotel, Whitby (raithwaiteestate. com; B&B from £227). ■■Tickets for the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (www. nymr.co.uk) from Goathland to Pickering are £23 per adult. Adult entry to attractions: ■■Alnwick Castle, from £13.95, alnwickcastle.com ■■Durham Cathedral, £7.50, durhamcathedral.co.uk ■■Warner Bros. Studio Tour from £37wbstudiotour.co.uk ■■Do your Harry Potter journey by train. Book through the Trainline App, enabling you to beat station queues and receive live travel updates. For details see yorkshire.com and thisisdurham.com and visitnorthumberland.com
On the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, dreams of attending Hogwarts are closer still. Goathland Station, a 20-minute drive from Whitby, doubled as Hogsmeade – the wizarding village where the Hogwarts Express pulls in – in the early Harry Potter films. And although there’s no burly Hagrid to greet us, snagging a turquoise ticket the size and shape of a dominoes tile requires its own kind of sorcery. There’s a knack to hunching down and peering through a strange, perspective-distorting window that makes the volunteer ticket officer on the other side – one of the many who help run the railway – appear as though he’s several miles away. You get the sensation you’re in a tunnel, or travelling by floo powder. It seems apt to end our trip by rail. After all, J. K. Rowling had the initial idea for Potter in 1990 while on a train to King’s Cross. Aboard the rhubarb-and-custardcoloured LNER B1 No. 61264 locomotive, which began its chug-life in 1947, I manage all of three minutes in my seat before leaping up to hang out of the window like an extra in The Railway Children. Without Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans to distract me, I stay there for the whole 50-minute journey to Pickering, trying to catch a glimpse of the train’s front portion as it turns up ahead, steam unspooling like the alabaster milk poured into cups of Yorkshire from the rattling tea trolley. I screech as sharply as the loco grinding to a halt when I spot a tawny owl. Flesh and blood, unlike the miniature Studio Tour ones, it’s as still as Snape’s robes, perched in a pine tree overlooking the railway line, with not a honeyed feather ruffled as we chug slowly past. My 28, and eight-year-old self, magically agree: it must be on owl post delivery duties.
The Chronicle 31
late s break last-minute holidays
EXPLORE SOUTH WALES INVITE friends and family along for a break at a 19th century farmhouse in Pembrokeshire. Stay seven nights from July 1, 8 or 15 in Reynalton House – tucked away on a 17-acre smallholding in the village of Reynalton and five miles from the seaside village of Saundersfoot – with Coastal Cottages of Pembrokeshire for £920 (saving £230). This large and airy property – with two sitting rooms – sleeps 10 in five bedrooms and is set in a large enclosed garden with decking. For further information and to book call 01437 772760 or visit coastalcottages.co.uk
Pembrokeshire bulgarian sunshine spend seven nights in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria from £439 per person, based on two adults sharing. Stay at the three-star smartline Meridian on an all inclusive basis, flying from Manchester on July 11. For further information and to book visit airtours.co.uk, call 0844 412 5970, or visit your nearest Thomas Cook or Co-operative Travel shop.