In which English county was J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood village of Sarehole?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood village of Sarehole was in Worcestershire.

Sarehole was a rural hamlet near Birmingham where Tolkien lived with his mother and younger brother from 1896 to 1900. At the time, the area was in Worcestershire, although later local-government changes placed it within the city of Birmingham. Tolkien remembered the landscape, water mill, trees, and countryside around Sarehole as important elements of his early imagination.

The Sarehole Mill and its surroundings are often discussed in connection with Tolkien’s childhood. The mill was a working watermill, and Tolkien’s memories of the miller and the rural setting have been linked by biographers and commentators to details in his imaginative writing. The connection should not be treated as a one-to-one identification of a fictional location, but Sarehole clearly mattered to his formative years.

Sarehole is sometimes assigned to Warwickshire because of its present-day relationship with Birmingham and the West Midlands. For Tolkien’s childhood setting, however, the historical county answer is Worcestershire.