[3340] Sarehole Mill, Birmingham, England

JRR Tolkien grew up across the road from Sarehole Mill and spent many hours exploring the grounds as a child; in later life he would draw on its rural surroundings to create Middle-earth.

 

There has been a mill on this site since 1542, and the current building dates from the mid-18th century. In the 1850s a steam engine was installed and the chimney – which provides its distinctive silhouette – was built.

 

There are also connections with another Birmingham son. Matthew Boulton, manufacturer and business partner of engineer James Watt, leased the building between 1756 and 1761 and used it as a ‘flatting mill’ to producing sheet metal to make buttons.

 

Text Ref: www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/sarehole-mill

 

J. R. R. Tolkien lived within 300 yards of the mill at around the turn of century, between the ages four and eight, and would have seen it from his house. The locale at that time was rural Worcestershire farmland and countryside. He has also said that he used the mill as a location in The Lord of the Rings, for the Mill at Hobbiton. In an interview with Guardian journalist, John Ezard in 1966, before the mill's restoration, Tolkien said:

 

It was a kind of lost paradise... There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go – and it did.

 

Text Ref: Wikipedia

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