Ignore for the moment the
smaller suburban roads on the modern map, mostly dating from the 1930s.
Running west to
east across its southern part is a much older road,
which goes by a variety of names along its length – Swanshurst Lane and
Cole Bank Road, for example, and here also follows the 11A/11C Outer Circle bus route. This is Tolkien’s Bywater Road.
Sarehole Mill and its Mill Pond are situated at the junction of this ancient route and
Wake Green Road – itself an old trackway heading north, then north-west. The No. 5 bus route, marked here in red, turns right into Springfield Road heading towards Sparkhill, which is therefore Tolkien’s Overhill, and in doing so crosses the No. 1 bus route, heading left along College Road towards Moseley Village – passing, on the way, the imposing Gothic edifice of Spring Hill College, part of Moseley School, built in the
1850s atop the highest hill in the area. Spring Hill College is famous locally for its mysterious tunnels, one of which is said to run from directly beneath the tower, under the middle of the college’s cricket pitch (at the far end of which once stood an obelisk inscribed with the words DUX FEMINA FACTI), and down the hill to Sarehole Mill. The hill on which the college stands therefore corresponds to The Hill at Hobbiton, into which Bag End was tunnelled.
Tolkien visited Spring Hill College as a child for Queen Victoria’s
Diamond
Jubilee in 1897, an event that may have inspired his description of Bilbo’s eleventy-first
birthday party. While all the original roads in Sarehole are
laid out in the same configuration
as those in Hobbiton, the River Cole, on the other hand, runs from south
to north, whereas The Water at Hobbiton lies parallel to the Bywater
Road. The much smaller Coldbath Brook, however – feeding the Mill Pond from Moseley Bog – is located in the correct
position, corresponding to The Water.