With Harry Potter's wizardry boarding school set to become the most talked-about school in the country this weekend, we went to visit a Muggle boarding school in York

WHEN Harry Potter starts as a first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he finds a welcome he never experienced in his lonely life as the unwanted house-guest of the Dursley family in Privet Drive.

Hogwarts helps the orphaned wizard to build up a magical surrogate family - his best friends Ron and Hermione, the wise-and-gentle bearded headmaster Professor Dumbledore, and strict-but-fair Professor McGonagall.

The school, with its house system and camaraderie, all boosts an image of fictional boarding schools which many remember from the jolly japes of Enid Blyton characters.

Like Harry Potter, many of her books told the story of a group of friends' progress through the school. In the Malory Towers series, each of the four houses lived in different towers of the castle-like building, the school was run by a calm, grey-haired headmistress and the house teams competed to win a strange-sounding and sometimes-dangerous game - lacrosse.

But boarding schools for many Harry Potter readers are not fictional places - they're routine, ordinary and everyday, not least in York and North and East Yorkshire, a region which has its fair share of independent schools.

Bootham School, in York, is one of them. Founded in 1832 by the Quakers, the 11 to 18 school today has about 400 pupils, and roughly a third of them are boarders. It costs £2,795 a term for day pupils; £4,275 per term for boarders and there has been a steady increase in boarding numbers over the last six years.

The surprising thing is how many of these boarders' families live locally with about a quarter coming from York and North Yorkshire.

We went along to talk to a small group of pupils about Harry Potter and Hogwarts, first of all in Penn House, one of the three boys' boarding houses. Cameron Johnston-Browne, 13, said his family lived in Helperby, 13-year-old Oliver Stead's family run a guest house in Haxby Road, York, and 12-year-old Bill Raines' family live near Malton. Many of them go home for the weekend and just stay from Sunday to Thursday nights, some even fewer.

Over in Rowntree House, the girls' house, Annabel Preacher, 12, from York, stays three nights a week, and Anna Peake, also from York, just two. It was quite reassuring to meet Lily Sarnyai who travels to Bootham every term from New York.

They all said that they remembered starting as boarders, and had found it "quite scary" to start with, but said the experience had not been as frightening as Harry arriving at the huge Hogwarts Castle.

Bootham boarders live in shared rooms with four to six pupils in each and with their own cluster of belongings round each bed. Meals are served in a hall, but it's not as big as Hogwarts, and there are kitchens where pupils can make snacks as well as TV rooms.

There are four houses and they compete at sport, but there's no lacrosse and Lily said there was much less competition than in the Potter books.

The close friendships are there, and some enemies too. Lily said: "There are some people who are really mean, but not to the extreme of Harry Potter."

Housemistress Jenny Bailey said: "I think they are written about boarding schools as they used to be. But the whole idea of family is still there."

It was all sounding a bit ordinary, until the boys got on to the subject of ghosts.

Oliver said: "There's this lady who comes along on Hallowe'en - she lives in the laundry baskets."

Bill went on: "The school is haunted. Sometimes when you're going through the Meeting Hall, a splat of water will come out of nowhere. Some of the doors lead to unexpected places."

"There's this door to the toilets where someone's put a tape which plays "Be scared, be very, very scared," said Oliver.

Perhaps they had been reading too many books.

Updated: 10:44 Tuesday, November 13, 2001