Fairy tale map Options

[travelbug]

The UK tourism office has launched an interactive map featuring storybook locations in a bid to attract younger visitors. Quite interesting:)

http://www.storybookengland.com/

[natcase]

Oh Cool.

Half my favorite books are on that list. More than half maybe.

The ones I actually have traveled to look at are the Susan Cooper The Dark Is Rising series. Went to Tywyn Wales in 1983, to Dorney and Cornwall in 1986. It was fun; none are really on the main tourist track, and in a couple places the locals I met had never heard of the books.

The reference here is interesting: it quotes Cooper as saying, "every stick is real", while I found the landscape of the books quite different from reality. The site says Mevagissey is the real model of Tressewick in ths books, but it is really more of an agglomeration of Mevagissey, Gorran Haven and other Cornish coastal towns. The geography of Dorney is not really the same as the fictional Huntercombe--it has been altered by the insertion of the M1 of course, but it just doesn't fit the fictional geography well. The "here to there" order doesn;t work. Which is fine, but unlike Arthur Ransome's books, which do pretty much exactly recreate the landscapes, Cooper's are as much evocations as anything. And she has said as much.

Also interesting they utterly leave out West Wales, the settings for books four and five. Beyond the scope, don't you know...