In the footsteps of Hardy

By Rebecca Fox

The cottage Thomas Hardy grew up in. Photos by Margaret Bannister.

Margaret Bannister.

Hillsides are all chalk!

The Heath.

Max Gate.

A love of Victorian writers, and personal connections with the southwest of England led to Margaret Bannister's fascination with English author Thomas Hardy. Rebecca Fox discovers what led the Otago Daily Times book reviewer to explore Hardy's countryside in Dorset.

It started with a simple request to review a book.

Thomas Hardy - The World of his Novels by Prof J. B. Bullen explored the different places Hardy had used to background and build the atmosphere of his stories.

Otago Daily Times books editor Helen Speirs immediately knew Margaret Bannister, with her love of the Victorians, would be the perfect candidate to review it.

Little did she realise this would lead to a trip to England to visit many of the sites mentioned in the book.

Having read the book, Ms Bannister immediately dug out her British Ordnance Survey maps, particularly 194, Dorchester and Weymouth.

''When I began to look at it, I realised that Dorset had many signs of ancient human habitation, and learned that some barrow and tumuli sites date back to Neolithic times (6000BC), which also stimulated my interest in this area.''

A great example is Maiden Castle, south of Dorchester, one of the largest Iron Age forts in the world, covering an area of 50 football fields.

''I began to think about a trip. I realised that I did not want to simply repeat what Prof Bullen wrote, but to expand my exploration of this fascinating county, and to think about the writer Thomas Hardy, growing up here in the 1840s.''

So in April she headed off to England.

She had also done some reading about the geology of this area which she found fascinating.

''It is a good time to go to this area in many ways. The weather can be dodgy, but it was very kind to me.

''I was treated to an ongoing display of spring wildflowers, daffodils, primroses, wood anemones and bluebells, in succession, which delight the eye, and the tourists are not too apparent.

"I suspect that Dorset is a county that many people dash through on their way to Devon and Cornwall, not realising what they are missing.''

Ms Bannister caught a bus from Heathrow to Weymouth, but could have taken it directly to Dorchester.

Weymouth is a ''somewhat brassy'' British seaside town, with many lovely Georgian buildings, she said.

Hardy called it Budmouth, and it features in The Trumpet Major, and in Hardy's lesser known story Desperate Remedies.

She hired a car and drove north to the little hamlet of Fifehead Neville, where she stayed in an apartment next to a carpenter's workshop, and with a very friendly and helpful couple who live in the main house.

''Driving up the A 3143 into North Dorset was a breathtaking experience, the extraordinarily green chalk hills, topped with woodland copses, in this area have a kind of intimacy and serenity that is hard to describe and even harder to catch in a photograph.''

There were faster roads to the north, but she preferred the slower ones, even though they were, in places, very narrow, with warning signs:

''Oncoming vehicles in the middle of the road''.

In little villages such as Piddletrenthide and Piddlehinton, the tiny houses, many thatched, fronted directly on to the road.

''I drove with great care but it gave me a chance to have a good look, too. Most people were very polite and gave way with a cheerful wave.''

She also visited Puddletown, the site of Hardy's Weatherbury in Far from the Madding Crowd.

Every village had its own church, usually on 13th-century foundations.

A most important visit was to Hardy's cottage in Higher Bockhampton, where he was born in 1840, a small and fragile baby, and grew up the oldest of four siblings with an ambitious and determined mother, Jemima.

Hardy walked to school, first at Lower Bockhampton, then at Dorchester, a three-mile walk, every day.

The cottage where he lived is deep in Thorncombe Wood.

''It can be approached directly by path, but the most interesting way is through the wood. This thatched and secluded cottage was home to seven people, and is not small.''

Hardy wrote a poem, Domicilium, about his grandmother's experience of living there, and Hardy's was probably not very different, she said.

''He was acutely sensitive to the natural world, and in touch with the local rural farm workers, playing violin with his father at weddings and parties.''

She walked up through Thorncombe Wood, to see the cottage and then on up to Rushy Pond, also the title of a poem, suddenly coming out on to the heath, the Egdon heath of The Return of the Native.

''I was speechless. It was a glorious day, in the woods the birds were singing, but coming on to the heath, suddenly there was silence.''

The heath was both ''forbiddingly wild and at the same time quite beautiful''.

''It was a magic moment. This was Hardy's playground as a child.''

Later she went to see Max Gate, the house Hardy built for himself just outside Dorchester.

''I felt that the house was interesting, but somehow sad, being the home where distance grew between himself and his wife Emma, and where she died suddenly. Hardy wrote the most heartrending poetry after her death.''

Dorchester itself is a small town, with history going back to the Romans.

There is an excavated Roman house, complete with mosaics, which is worth a visit, she said, and an ''excellent'' museum, with an area devoted to Hardy, and also huge fossils dug out of the cliffs along the coast.

Other places Ms Bannister visited included Waterston House, used by Hardy as a basis for Weatherbury farm, and Melbury Bubb, a tiny place very buried in the countryside, which figured as the house of George Melbury in The Woodlanders.

Finding Hardy's grave in Stinsford churchyard was quite difficult. Hardy's heart was buried next to the grave of his wife, while his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey.

''One gets a sense that the locals do not really want to publicise all these things.''

The grave of Cecil Day-Lewis is also there, poet laureate and father of the actor Daniel.

Sherborne Abbey to the north was a pleasure to explore, as were Glastonbury and Wells Cathedral, she said.

''I was unable to do the boat trip along the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, a World Heritage site, but did manage to cram in a trip to Lulworth Cove to see Stair Hole, where rocks are bent and twisted in an extraordinary way.''

Overall, apart from falling in love with the countryside, Ms Bannister had time to think about the Victorians, and the impact of both the Industrial Revolution and the publishing of Darwin's Origin of Species on the period when Hardy lived and wrote.

''I felt that his rural background and connection to the largely farm working people of his background gave him a very grounded view of Victorian society, its values and prejudices.

''This is very apparent in his last two novels, and while it gave him considerable pain, the negative response to these also helped him to turn again to poetry, always his first love.

''I cannot wait to go back and do all the things I missed.''

Thomas Hardy

Born: June 2, 1840

1856-61: Apprenticed to architect John Hicks

1862-67: Working for architect Arthur Blomfield in London

1867-70: Returned to Dorset to work on church restoration

1874: Far From The Madding Crowd (serial form); married Emma Lavinia Gifford on September 17; moved to Sturminster Newton

1878: The Return Of The Native; moved back to London

1883: Moved back to Dorchester

1885: Moved into Max Gate

1887: The Woodlanders

1888: Wessex Tales