Goblin | Hakwon Farm, Gochang — The Buckwheat Field He Came Back To

Buckwheat flowers mean "lover" in the flower language the drama keeps invoking, which is why Kim Shin is holding a bunch of them the first time Eun-tak calls him out of nowhere. The field they come from is real and it is enormous.

Hakwon Farm sits on rolling ground at Yejeon-ri in Gochang, North Jeolla. It runs on a two-season rotation that is worth understanding before you drive four hours: green barley carpets the hills in April and May, and buckwheat comes in white in September. If you want the flowers from the drama, come in September. Arrive in June and you will find bare tilled earth and wonder what happened.

The scale is the point. This is not a garden — it is a working farm of about a hundred hectares, with tracks running between the blocks and no crowding except during the barley festival. White buckwheat over a whole hillside in low light does something that photographs badly and looks extraordinary in person, which is roughly the problem the show's cinematographer solved by shooting it at dusk.

Open daily from half nine. There is a car park, a café and a shop. Public transport out here is close to useless; this is a drive.

Walk into the middle of a block, far enough that the tracks disappear, and stop. Nine hundred years of loneliness is an abstraction until you are standing in the middle of several million identical small white flowers with nobody in sight.

Cover photo: a Korean buckwheat field at Bongpyeong, by Cho's, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Representative crop view, not Hakwon Farm.