Local flavour

I reread Alan Garner's The Moon of Gomrath yesterday. It is a fine book and a personal childhood favourite. However rereading it after such a length of time and a mass of intervening fiction led me to realise for the first time a common factor in many of the books I read as a child: The protagonists (usually implicitly or explicity middle class English children) going to visit/stay with a suitably 'interesting' local/regional types. This first stage of strangeness is usually followed by more fantastical (of the either the strictly fantasy kind or the purely improbable) happenings but this first initial dislocation opens up this possibility but putting the children into another 'holiday' world.