Since I was a child I have wanted to get into the magical land of Narnia. I can remember praying to God that he would allow me to get into Narnia. I climbed into my wardrobe - a built in one full of pink satin party dresses - and banged on the back. Nothing. Only the thud of plyboard. It was only later, when my faith in God had matured that I felt that in some metaphysical way I had in fact 'got into Narnia'.
So, imagine my excitement when I realised that CS Lewis had been inspired by my birthplace of Northern Ireland when he wrote Narnia! Here is what I wrote for The Observer last Christmas:
Northern Ireland
If You Didn't Find Narnia in Your Own Wardrobe...... you might just find it in Northern Ireland, the birthplace of CS Lewis and beloved inspiration for the author's fictional land. In the week the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is released, Fiona Campbell goes searching for Aslan
this article first appeared on Sunday December 4, 2005
The Observer
Fantasy land... in the snow-capped landscape of the Mourne Mountains, CS Lewis felt 'that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge'. [photo courtesy of Northern Ireland Tourist Office]
When Disney scoured the world looking for a location to play Narnia's mythical landscape, they chose New Zealand's fantastical soaring mountains and sun-scorched grassy plains. As Ronald Bresland has shown in his book, "The Backward Glance," it would have pleased CS Lewis, Narnia's creator, but it wouldn't have resonated with his love of 'Northernness'. For Lewis the portal into Narnia was far closer to home - Ulster.
'I have seen landscapes, notably in the Mourne Mountains and southwards which under a particular light made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge,' he wrote in his essay On Stories. While living in England he spoke of the magic of Northern Ireland: 'I yearn to see County Down in the snow, one almost expects to see a march of dwarfs dashing past. How I long to break into a world where such things were true.'
And in a letter to his brother, he confided explicitly: 'That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.'
While he loved the countryside, in a letter to his best friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis confessed that he was less fond of the people. 'The country is very beautiful and if only I could deport the Ulstermen and fill their land with a populace of my own choosing, I should ask for no better place to live in.' This, argue some experts, is what he did when creating Narnia.
Clive Staples Lewis grew up in Ulster, honeymooned there and continued to return throughout his life, and yet you will find no mention of the bestselling author in most guidebooks to Ireland. Only now, with the release of the Disney film, the area is waking up to this major aspect of its heritage.
The Northern Ireland Tourist Board has produced a lustrous, full-colour booklet detailing Lewis's local links. Harper Taxi Tours, which usually takes tourists round the Shankill and Falls Roads to see the murals and sites of Belfast's political history, has branched out into a more magical subject area and created a CS Lewis tour. Queen's University is dedicating a reading room, and there is even a CS Lewis Festival that started on Friday and runs until 11 December. It is all thanks to lottery and EU funding of 'Celebrate Belfast', aimed at shaking off the city's troubled image and revitalising its tourism.
I have been obsessed with the Narnia books since reading them and, like many children, trying to reach Narnia by climbing into my wardrobe. Perhaps it appealed all the more because I too grew up in Ulster, and I too left (me aged seven, CS Lewis aged 10). I have happy childhood memories of playing with my brother in the barley fields during holidays in Northern Ireland, and perhaps Narnia appealed because it reminded me of all the best parts of Ulster that I knew and missed. So I set off to revisit my old haunts to see if they would remind me of Narnia.
On our first day in Ulster, tour guide Ken Harper loaded my eccentric family into his (burgundy) Black Taxi. There was my two-year-old son Leo, beaming in his buggy, along with Olga, his Russian nanny, and Roslyn, my grown-up Irish cousin.
First stop was St Mark's, Holywood Road, Belfast, the church Lewis attended. 'You can see the door knob with a lion on it on the rectory where Lewis's grandfather lived,' said Ken enthusiastically.
We were sceptical about how worthwhile a journey to see a doorknob would be, but there was something surprisingly mystical about that lion. Jack, as CS Lewis liked to be called, would have looked up to the doorknob just as Leo was doing now, and seen this majestic lion transporting him to corridors of magic.
In fact my family and the Lewises came from the same social circle. Perhaps that's why Little Lea, Lewis's childhood home, seemed familiar; it was almost exactly like my grandmother's house. It had the same sense of abundance - solid door frames of ample size, generous, mysterious wardrobes, spacious rooms; nothing skimped. In Northern Ireland there is an unspoken understanding that things are done to the full. This is very much what the 'happy land of Narnia' is about - it is a land of butter and cream, of plenty, made even more poignant because it was written during postwar hardship, when even potatoes (to Lewis's consternation) were rationed.
Little Lea is now privately owned and the new owners prefer not to have tourists visiting, so Ken gave us the house's history from the gates. I tiptoed up to the front door of the house, in whose 'Little End Room' Lewis spent hours of his childhood inventing stories about other worlds and talking to animals and looking out across Co Down to the Mourne Mountains beyond. It is a mysteriously complex piece of Victorian architecture with rambling outhouses and a pleasant garden. Beyond would have been rolling countryside. This is where Jack spent the happiest years of his childhood before his mother died in 1908 when he was nine. The Chronicles of Narnia may have been his attempt to evoke that lost sense of childhood happiness.
Ken drove us through the housing estates of East Belfast, where a CS Lewis mural rises like a beacon of goodness amid the menacing slogans of conflict. Protestant CS Lewis had virtually no interest in politics. 'I believe that ... those who are at the heart of each division [of religion] are all closer to one another than to those who are at the fringes,' he wrote to one Catholic correspondent.
When we climbed the Holywood hills and saw the vivid green fields and glinting sea I began to feel that this really was the brink of Narnia. Lewis would have walked these hills and looked out across Belfast, 'ringing with the sound of the hammers that built the Titanic', to the countryside lapping into the distance. And beyond, the portentous and dominating Mourne Mountains.
Lewis was longing for, as his brother puts it, 'the lost simplicity of country pleasures, the empty sky, the unspoilt hills, the white silent roads on which you could hear the rattle of a farm cart half a mile away'. To get a sense of that world, head for the extraordinary, if melancholy, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. This 175-acre site, in the Holywood hills where Lewis grew up, is a town and surrounding rural area frozen exactly as it would have been in 1901.
The northern coast of Antrim was much loved by Lewis. Ronald Bresland, author of The Backward Glance: CS Lewis and Ireland, argues that 'among the romantic ruins of Dunluce Castle and the windswept beaches of the Causeway Coast, we can detect something of the origins of Cair Paravel [Narnia's fairytale castle].'
In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis describes the castle 'towering up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea, and long lines of bluish green waves breaking forever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the sea-gulls!' For the real Narnia as Lewis intended it, 'Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests' (The Horse and His Boy), you need to see Down. 'The green hills ... The soft low hills of Down,' as Lewis wrote in a poem.
On your way stop at Rowallane Gardens. They have a quiet, almost forgotten feeling a little like the garden beyond the hills in The Magician's Nephew. Enter by the Golden Gates (OK, wrought iron, but still...) and enjoy roaming among the profuse flowers.
Then head to Rostrevor, or stay at The Old Inn in Crawfordsburn where CS Lewis and Joy Gresham enjoyed an 'almost perfect' belated honeymoon. At night settle down by the fire and read the Irish myths Lewis's nurse, Lizzie Endicott, delighted her young charge with, or have spirited debates about whether myth is truth, or the existence of God, as Lewis loved to do.
By day you can enjoy Tollymore Forest Park and visit the Mourne Heritage Trust in Newcastle who will guide you on walks through the Mournes and Silent Valley.
Despite a shocking amount of recent development in the form of boxy uPVC-windowed houses, Northern Ireland is a great destination for a family holiday. Leo exulted in the child-friendly attractions, including the world-class W5 Museum, with more than 140 interactive exhibits. The renowned warmth of the Northern Irish welcome doubles when you have young children in tow, and Leo left thinking he was royalty.
For many, the area's appeal as a family tourist destination has been long overshadowed by the conflict, but as you look out over Co Down from the Mournes, you may feel Ulster coming back to life, like a stone giant breathed on by Aslan.
Factfile
'Northern Ireland and CS Lewis', a booklet giving details of the places that inspired the author, and how to get there, is available from the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (028 9023 1221;
www.discovernorthernireland.com). Details of Ken Harper's CS Lewis Black Taxi Tour are at
www.harpertaxitours.co.nr or call 028 9074 2711.
Double rooms at the Malone Lodge Hotel (028 9038 8000;
www.www.malonelodgehotel.com in Belfast start from £89, bed and breakfast.
In County Down, try the Kilmorey Arms Hotel in Kilkeel (028 4176 2220;
www.kilmoreyarmshotel.co.uk or The Old Inn, Crawfordsburn (028 9185 3255;
www.theoldinn.com where CS Lewis spent his honeymoon with Joy Gresham.
Easyjet (0905 821 0905;
www.easyjet.com). flies from eight English and Scottish cities to Belfast from £26 return.
--
Labels: books, film, Narnia, parenting, travel
