The Shire measured 40 leagues (193 km, 120 miles) east to west and 50 leagues (241 km, 150 miles) from north to south, with an area of some 18,000 square miles (47,000 km 2): roughly that of the English Midlands. The Shire was fully inland most hobbits feared the Sea. The landscape included downland and woods like the English countryside. They had agriculture but were not industrialized. In Tolkien's fiction, the Shire is described as a small but beautiful, idyllic and fruitful land, beloved by its hobbit inhabitants. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that all the same, they provided the "depth", the feeling in the reader's mind that this was a real and complex place, a quality that Tolkien believed essential to a successful fantasy. Little of his carefully crafted fictional geography, history, calendar, and constitution appeared in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, though additional details were given in the Appendices of later editions. Tolkien took considerable trouble over the exact details of the Shire. In Peter Jackson's films of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the Shire was represented by countryside and constructed hobbit-holes on a farm near Matamata, New Zealand, which became a tourist destination. Tolkien based the Shire's landscapes, climate, flora, fauna, and placenames on rural England where he lived, first in Worcestershire as a boy, then in Oxfordshire. The main action in The Lord of the Rings returns to the Shire near the end of the book, in " The Scouring of the Shire", when the homebound hobbits find the area under the control of Saruman's ruffians, and set things to rights. Five of the protagonists in these stories have their homeland in the Shire: Bilbo Baggins (the title character of The Hobbit), and four members of the Fellowship of the Ring: Frodo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took. The Shire is the scene of action at the beginning and end of Tolkien's The Hobbit, and of the sequel, The Lord of the Rings. It is in the northwest of the continent, in the region of Eriador and the Kingdom of Arnor. The Shire is an inland area settled exclusively by hobbits, the Shire-folk, largely sheltered from the goings-on in the rest of Middle-earth. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth, described in The Lord of the Rings and other works. Fictional England-like home region of hobbits in J.
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