Yorkshire and Middle-earth 3

Peter Jackson's films gave us a visual legacy of a sort. Had it not been for his dedicated persistence, the Tolkien world would have missed out on many things. But the films are not without flaws and the most fundamental of these, from my point of view, is their 'unrealism'. That may seem a strange criticism when their subject matter was a high fantasy, but it always struck me that Tolkien's main achievement was making Middle-earth seem real. The starting point for my long-planned BBC television series of The Lord of the Rings was always going to be some close-upland long shots of landscapes, trees and flowers. Tolkien's triumph was to embed the fantastic within the real.

That's why I offer up more 'snaps' of Yorkshire as Middle-earth here.