Position 37 52.377S  175 40.500E

At a farm down Buckland Road (can you believe that), near a small town called Matamata, where the tourist office is undergoing a hobbit transformation, is The Shire / Hobbiton.  Normally all film sets are dismantled after use for copyright reasons, but here bad weather delayed that.  The farmer, according to the young (useless) guide we had, thought locals might be interested and persuaded the film company to let him keep the burrows.  Don’t believe a word of that for a minute.  The Alexander’s, who own this farm, have 1250 acres with sheep and beef.  Anyway, he/she and an accountant turned into tourist operation. $75 a head for a guided tour, you can’t go around on your own, and the tours go every 30 mins.  We recon they are making $1 million / week.  The guide we had was absolutely useless, stop here for 10 mins and take photos was his pet phrase.  Anyway here are some of the photo’s … we have lots, lots more….seriously, we do.

Originally the NZ army built a 1.5km road to the site and did a lot of initial earth moving to make 42 Hobbit holes with untreated timber, ply and polystyrene.…  A selection of dwellings, there should be something in the picture to give away the owners occupation.

There seem to be a lot of gardeneres and wood cutters around…

Anyone home? View on the right is of the new set built for The Hobbit.  Funnily enough the farm owners insisted that this new set, and the old set were (re)built out of permanent materials, I wonder why.  We weren’t allowed any nearer than this.

The oak tree above Bag End.  Originally this was a real oak tree that was cut down and bought in from Matamata.  For The Hobbit Trilogy a fake one was built of steel and silicon.  The artificial leaves are from Taiwan and the trunks and branches are made from molded casts set around real oak tree.  The bench outside Bag End that young Bilbo sat on when Gandalf comes by in the opening of The Hobbit.

‘No Admittance, except on part business’ and steps leading up to the door to Bag End (on the right), you could not go any further than the gate.  It took three months to film The Lord of the Rings Trilogy but only 12 days to film The Hobbit Trilogy.

Oooooooh the stairs and door to Bag End.