Remembered Hills

[steepholm]

I had a little adventure from Wednesday to Thursday, travelling into the debatable Welsh marches, and the even more debatable borderlands of Herefordshire and Shropshire, to check out the setting of the 2017 anime, Mary and the Witch's Flower. The film was based on Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick (1971) - which I saw in Kichijouji shortly after its release. I'd suspected from the beginning that it was based on a real place, but had been unable to track it down until recently, when a colleague who happens to be a Shropshire lad gave me a clue.

So, off I went to spend the night in the same house where Mary was staying in the film - which in real life is a B&B and country farmhouse. Back in 2015 the director and crew stayed there too, taking lots of pictures of the owner's furniture and fittings, many of which reappeared in cartoon form in the film. I showed the owner the DVD, and she was surprised to see the coffee mug from which she was drinking appear on the screen in front of her, among many other things.

Normally at this point I'd entertain you (or at least myself) with lots of side-by-side pictures of real-vs-anime versions of various views, but since most are interiors of someone else's home I'm a bit shy about doing that today. For what it's worth though, here is the wood where the witch's flower is found in the film, and alongside it Coxall Knoll, which the filmmakers used as a model. You'll have to take my word for it.

Comments

[cmcmck]

You should have come by and looked us up! :o)

[steepholm]

Of course - how stupid of me! You're in that general wood neck, aren't you?

[cmcmck]

North Shropshire- Wellington under the Wrekin.

[steepholm]

That's a bit further north, but had I been able to come at weekend I would in fact have gone on to Wellington, to visit Sunnycroft, the NT property there. (Do you know it?) That too is rumoured to be a model for some of the scenes in the film. Only open at weekends at the moment, unfortunately.

(My maternal grandmother was from Wellington, so there would have been an element of filial piety about the visit, too.)

[cmcmck]

Know it well- it's literally four hundred yards from where we live and we can see it from upstairs.

It's been closed way too long and there have been complaints!