The main house was the Birmingham Oratory Retreat and had a Catholic burial ground. Fern Cottage was in a lane to the rear of the Oratory Retreat.
The Catholics of New York raised a collection as a testimonial to that and it was the money provided by this that at last enables Saint Philip’s spirit from the hands of Newman to venture on the purchase of ground for a burial spot. Situated on the brow of one of the four ‘Lickey Hills’, eight miles from Edgbaston, the cemetery was sited, and a small house built as a place of quiet community retreat. Not within the Oratory’s property, but in a lane immediately to the rear, the local postman and his wife had a cottage. Father Francis arranged for two rooms to be rented for the Tolkien’s, and for the lady of the house to provide food and household support. Overjoyed by their idyllic new surroundings, the boys probably did not realise how fast their mother’s condition was deteriorating. In November 1904, with Father Francis and her sister present, Mabel Tolkien quietly passed away. It was not to be the end of Rednall and the Lickey Hills for the Tolkiens, for in the years to come there were to be countless visits with Father Francis to the Oratory House. Indeed it was a location of some significance as the woods in the rear of the Oratory House, and across the Hills in general, manifestly helped in the formation of the forest atmospherics of J. R. R.’s future fiction, and the name of the Elvish village of 'Rivendell' it seems was adapted from Rednall.
