High up on England’s North York Moors, a holiday cottage inspired by Hagrid’s home in the Harry Potter movies is now available for fans to rent. The Ground Keeper’s Cottage will welcome its first guests in time for International Harry Potter Day on 2 May, and the location could not be more perfect: on a farm ten minutes down the road from the village steam train station filmed as Hogwarts station in the movies.
The cottage is configured as three interlocking circular rooms, with squat, medieval-looking turrets and mismatched stained-glass windows as a nod to the gothic demeanour of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Its stooped doorway is lit by lanterns and the cottage is surrounded by fields that lead to views of the Yorkshire coast. Guests can even bring their own Fang, as the cottage is dog-friendly.
Inside, the decor is rustic. Pots, pans and lanterns hang from the barn-like ceiling, there’s a log burning stove, a 17th-century chest, and a quill and ink pot. Owner Carol Cavendish, an avid Harry Potter fan herself, says she hopes guests will have fun uncovering what else is there. ‘You have to hunt around. I like the idea of people discovering new things constantly,’ she told Lonely Planet News.
The open-plan living area leads to a bedroom with a double bed and bunk bed fashioned out of wooden beams. The bathroom, however, has a completely different feel. ‘You never see the bathroom in the films so I based it on the Ministry of Magic, using the ministry’s tiles’ says Carol. ‘But it also has a Hogwarts-style toilet in it – like an old school toilet.’ The sink is made from an old oak barrel, and the centrepiece is a freestanding copper bath.
An old Ford Anglia just like Ron Weasley’s flying car also sits in the farm grounds. ‘We had it repaired and then had to mess it all up again,’ says Carol.
Carol’s family, which includes her five children, bought the six-acre North Shire farm nine years ago and have been working towards creating a ‘storybook fantasy world’ with cottages, gypsy caravans, camping and shepherds’ huts. North Shire’s other cottages include Potts Corner, which mimics a Hobbit house with a round doorway and turf roof, and the Storybook Cottage that has a Narnia wardrobe leading to a hidden bedroom.
The farm’s other inhabitants are miniature ponies, goats, a cackle of witches’ black cats, Gandalf the cockerel, and peacocks called Merlin and Guinevere. There’s also an on-site cafe called the Green Dragon, serving Yorkshire pies and homemade cakes, which is based on a medieval roundhouse and has a tree growing through the middle of it. The Ground Keeper’s Cottage was built by Billy Cessford, a local stage and screen prop maker and set designer from Redcar, North Yorkshire, who has worked in theatre and with the BBC. Stays cost from £195 (US$254) per night and the cottage sleeps six.
North Shire is in the North York Moors National Park, a 20-minute drive from the seaside town of Whitby, where Bram Stoker set part of his 19th-century gothic horror novel Dracula, and an hour-and-a-half from the city of York. York’s most famous medieval street, the Shambles, is rumoured to have been the inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books, and is now home to a number of themed shops where fans can buy wands, Quidditch uniforms and other Harry Potter paraphernalia.
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