Dunluce Castle, which some scholars believe inspired CS Lewis’s Cair Paravel, the castle capital of Narnia. Photograph: Shawn Williams/Getty Images/iStockphoto View image in fullscreen Dunluce Castle, which some scholars believe inspired CS Lewis’s Cair Paravel, the castle capital of Narnia. Photograph: Shawn Williams/Getty Images/iStockphoto Belfast holidays ‘The view from the Mournes was CS Lewis’s idea of Narnia’: how Northern Ireland inspired a magical kingdom Ahead of Netflix’s Chronicles of Narnia dropping early next year, we discover the fantastical landscapes that fired the Belfast-born author’s imagination
Prefer the Guardian on Google O n the gable walls of the tough, working-class streets of east Belfast, the mystical beasts of Narnia vie for brick space with balaclava-wearing loyalists. The murals of the city have long projected the power of paramilitaries, but in recent years they have also begun to reflect the more positive contributions made by other local people, including the author CS Lewis .
Lewis was born in Dundela in 1898 in an attractive terrace house that has sadly since been demolished to be replaced by rather unattractive flats. But elsewhere in this part of the city, the Lewis connection is being built on and celebrated. CS Lewis Square is in the Holywood Arches neighbourhood and has a short walking trail featuring metal sculptures of Mr and Mrs Beaver, Mr Tumnus and other beloved characters from The Chronicles of Narnia. The centrepiece is a gigantic Aslan, towering over all from atop a circular mound.
View image in fullscreen A CS Lewis mural in east Belfast. Photograph: Stephen Barnes NI/Alamy About 15 minutes’ walk away, St Mark’s church on the Holywood Road is the proud custodian of a much smaller lion that may have inspired Lewis’s creation of Aslan. His grandfather, the Rev Thomas Hamilton , ministered here, living in the rectory for 13 years, and his front door was decorated with a beautiful brass lion’s head doorknob. The original has been removed for safekeeping, but an exact replica attracts thousands of Lewis pilgrims each year.
Leafy Circular Road, half a mile away, is where the Lewis family moved in 1905 to a large, redbrick house that, back then, was on the outskirts of the city. The road has since been subsumed by the growth of the town, but remains the realm of the prosperous. The house, called Little Lea, is privately owned, but can be seen from the iron gates at the end of the drive.
“To a child, it seemed less like a house than a city,” Lewis wrote of the family home in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude.”
View image in fullscreen The Aslan sculpture in CS Lewis Square, east Belfast. Photograph: Radharc Images/Alamy Little Lea appears in the opening two Narnia books, first when a boy exploring a large attic in The Magician’s Nephew finds a way into another world, and then in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when a game of hide and seek leads a group of inquisitive children to that same magical world a generation later.
Although it was close to east Belfast’s industrial heartland, it was also just a fence clamber away from the fields, hills and woodland glens that fringed the city like a vast adventure playground. As children, Lewis and his elder brother Warnie seem to have had a freedom to wander that would terrify modern parents. They would trek for hours up into the hi…