Wiltshire gets Lord of the Rings makeover by map maker

It's not the first time Chris Birse has turned a southern county into a fantasy map.

Author: Jack DeeryPublished 18th Sep 2020

Wiltshire has been turned into 'The Shire', as a Lord of the Rings style map of the county has been finished.

Chris Birse, from Norton near Middlesborough, is the wizard behind the creation which features many towns, villages and landmarks from across Wiltshire.

Living up the other end of the country, Chris asked for some suggestions on what to put on the map and was undated with responses, with over 1000 in total!

The full Lord of the Rings style map of Wiltshire

Chris told Greatest Hits Radio:

"It all started about 2 years ago when I was writing a novel and I just needed to come up with a map to go in the front of the book to show where the characters were travelling and I just thought I would give it a go designing it myself and I quite enjoyed the process so I thought, for a bit of a laugh, I would do my own region in a fantasy style, got loads of great feedback from it and it just kind of took off from there really.

As I live so far away what I do is join lots of Facebook groups of the local area and I ask for people's input, so rather than just going on Google and getting all the obvious ones like Stonehenge and Woodhenge, I try and get lots of the little local ones, things like a barrow next to someone's village and stuff like that and I just get a lot of detail that I wouldn't find otherwise.

I'm thrilled with the final product, by far it has had the most positive response out of all of the ones I done so far, I couldn't be happier to be honest."

It's not the first time Chris has turned an English county into the home of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins.

Dorset, Somerset and Devon have all had the same treatment as well, and he is hoping to create one for every county in the country, Hampshire is next.

They've all been turned into canvasses for people to buy and Chris is thinking about making them into jigsaw puzzles.

They can be found on the Fantasy World Maps Facebook page.