Muggles' guide to Potter's world

How does a Muggle enter the magical world of Harry Potter?

Well, you could try what Harry himself does in the new movie, and go to King's Cross station, stand between the ticket barriers for Platforms 9 and 10, step well back, and take a run-up at a point exactly between the two.

Now, if you are a wizard, instead of braining yourself, you will slip through on to Platform 93/ 4, from which departs the steam train for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. For a Muggle - and, of course, Harry Potter fans will know this means a non-magical human - it has to be said that the chances of success might be slightly lessened.

So, for those of a nervous disposition, here is a guaranteed, painfree way to break into the world of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone. You can catch up with his train a little further north and travel through the Forbidden Forest to the village of Hogsmeade, where Harry alights for Hogwarts.

I should make it clear that you are not going to find these magical names on a Muggle Ordnance Survey map. So, to translate, you should go to Pickering, and pick up a steam train on the North York Moors Railway.

You might imagine that the fantastical land J. K. Rowling creates for her young hero could not possibly exist in the real world, that it could be recreated only in a film studio, and with lavish special effects.

But almost all of the locations in Warner Brothers' blockbuster film Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, which opens next month, exist, and most welcome visitors.

Warner Brothers would rather you didn't visit. Their view is that to dwell on the real locations for the film is to risk destroying its magic, and they swore those involved in the filming to secrecy.

At Pickering station they can't resist though, and in a corner of the souvenir shop they have pasted up two newspaper cuttings showing Harry Potter on the railway, and are selling one or two items of Potter merchandise, including a rather handy zigzag forehead scar.

The North York Moors Railway - or the Harry Potter Line as a marketing guru might recommend it is swiftly renamed - is a splendid way to see some breathtaking scenery.

It runs for 18 miles north east from Pickering, taking a valley route which shelters it below the bleak moorland. It forges a way, engineered by George Stephenson in 1836, through deep and rocky gorges and fords, cuts through woodland, spans valleys and stops a few miles short of the seaside town of Whitby.

I decide to stay on the train, passing through the Forbidden Forest, and head for Hogsmeade. In Muggle-speak the Forbidden Forest is called Cropton Forest. The train was filmed steaming through on its way to Hogsmeade - or Goathland, to give it its Muggle name.

Goathland is a pretty, stone-built moorland village strung out for a mile along a lush green ridge in the North York Moors National Park. It's a steep climb up to it and the train labours asthmatically, its smoke getting greyer and greyer as it puffs into the station.

Here at Goathland, Harry and a couple of hundred extras stream off the train, climb over the footbridge and head off to Hogwarts.

For more than a decade, Goathland has been the home of the ITV drama series Heartbeat, set in the Sixties in a moorland village called Aidensfield. It's a star-struck place this. Why, only a couple of weeks before Harry Potter passed through, Gwyneth Paltrow was here filming Possession. They should rename it Hollywood-on-the-Moors.

Goathland is like an actor who likes to remain in character even when not performing. The pub, the Goathland Hotel, carries a sign proclaiming its screen name - The Aidensfield Arms.

Opposite is Mostyns Garage (aka Aidensfield Garage), owned by Bob Wood, which has been in business for almost 30 years and still very much a going concern.

At the Goathland/Aidensfield Stores there is an indication, among the Heartbeat tea towels and Claude Greengrass fridge magnets, that these canny Yorkshire folk are beginning to wake up to the potential of Harry Potter as well. There is a Quidditch T-shirt in the window.

Hogwarts school does not have a real-life location here. Indeed, the filmmakers had to travel far and wide to gather the bits that make up the school. Which is not surprising, considering that Hogwarts has 142 staircases, which you can never be sure will lead today where they led yesterday, countless secret passages, numerous ghosts and a Great Hall with an enchanted ceiling that looks like the night sky.

But you can take a walk in the Forbidden Forest. I hopped on a train for one stop to Newton Dale Halt. Except it didn't stop. As I discovered too late, you have to tell the guard in advance if you want to alight in this remote spot. So I had to get off at Levisham, at the edge of Cropton Forest, and walk back.

Stepping away from the station you are plunged immediately into the dark, silent woodland. On either side of the track, regiments of fir trees shut out almost all the light and spread underfoot a deep, soft carpet of ginger needles that completely muffle your footsteps. Which means that when you come upon another person you do so silently, invariably giving each other a fright.

Even the train creeps up on you. The rails are just a few yards from the path but you don't hear the trains until they are almost upon you.

I strode on purposefully, but dark clouds had extinguished the autumn sun, the wind had picked up and the first spots of rain were falling. No doubt I'd just been reading too much Harry Potter on the train, but the people I met here did seem rather odd.

None was as strange, admittedly, as Hagrid, the giant Hogwarts gamekeeper who has his hut here, but weird enough.

There was the trainspotter who stalked off along the rails, camera at the ready, while his wife - in an affecting picture of ennui - squatted in the mud, poking at a puddle with a stick. And the two men with plastic bags held aloft, skipping through the undergrowth. Blackberriers? Perhaps. And the three people pushing a van that had got stuck in the mud - two from the rear, one at the front pushing against them. Should I tell them? Should I help?

Time also seems muffled in the forest. I'd been walking for what seemed like plenty of time to reach the station when I came across a cottage, and a sign reading Very Slow Children. I would have asked, very slowly, how much further I had to go, but no one answered my knock.

I plodded on through the drizzle to a place very aptly named Raindale, and found another sign: Very Slow Residents. They'd be the parents of the very slow children then.

Finally, I found the little rustic platform and, oh joy, a train was steaming towards it. Even better, it stopped!

As I sank into my seat I flicked through my guidebook and learned that this place has a legend of its own that predates J. K. Rowling. Just beyond the forest is a place called the Hole of Horcum. Legend has it that Horcum, a giant, had an argument with the Devil and scooped up a handful of earth to throw at him from the moor, forming the hole of Horcum, a deep, unnaturallooking hollow in the moors. They don't invent tales like that around here any more. Or, rather, they do!