Home counties

WHENEVER Bilbo Baggins’s thoughts turn wistfully to his Shire home and a restorative cup of tea, usually after an uncomfortable encounter with an orc or a troll, one instinctively empathises. Tolkein’s Shire—the Anglo-Saxon word for what we now think of as a county (from the French , introduced by the Normans), a place of cultural identity and devolved administration—symbolised home and warm feelings of relief, familiarity and security: indeed, the alternative title of his enduring novel is .