Thomas Hardy’s harsh coast
Far From the Madding Crowd film renews interest in author’s writing and homeland
was in Lulwind Cove, an inlet on England’s south coast, that the dastardly Sgt. Troy took an impromptu swim in Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel about an uncommonly independent Victorian woman and her suitors.
The water in the cove was “smooth as a pond,” Hardy wrote, until Troy “swam between the two projecting spurs of rock which formed the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean,” whereupon he was swept out to sea and presumed drowned, only to make a dramatic reappearance — this being a Hardy novel — at a most inconvenient moment.
On an evening last summer, the sun still high, my wife and I, our 1-year-old daughter strapped to my chest, walked the grassy loam above the cove. The spot is actually called Lulworth Cove and is a fan-shaped bay formed by erosion of the cliffs. It and Durdle Door, an impressive limestone arch a little farther along the coast, are hallmarks of the Jurassic Coast, a 95-mile stretch of shoreline where rock formations and fossils record 185 million years of geological history.
The water below the cliffs was a cerulean blue from the mineral deposits washed into them from the crumbling stone, while the English Channel beyond retained the “clear oily polish” Hardy described. To the north lay rolling maize fields and dairy pastures, the roads and tidy plots bordered by ancient hedgerows. A few swimmers braved the water, still frigid in June, and, as on the day of Troy’s swim, “a frill of milkwhite foam along the nearer angles of the shore. licked the contiguous stones like tongues.”
Though we were in the county of Dorset, Hardy called this part of England “Wessex,” using the area’s Saxon name. He described it as “partly real, partly dream” country. It is a region as inextricable from Hardy as the Mississippi of William Faulkner or V.S. Naipaul’s Trinidad. The term “cliffhanger,” in fact, is said to have originated with Hardy, after he left one of his characters dangling from a Wessex cliff at the end of a chapter in a serialized novel.
Though Hardy country, as it is known here, is dotted with actual landmarks such as churches, markets and villages from the author’s novels, I was as interested in the pastoral landscapes that he is famous for describing; the farmland and heath with sandstone cottages, sheep pastures and Roman roads ending abruptly at dramatic seaside cliffs. And since Dorset is relatively unspoiled by modern development, it isn’t hard to imagine, with a squint of the eyes, the countryside as Hardy saw it.
My wife grew up near Lyme Regis, a pretty harbour town on the western end of Dorset, about 240 kilometres west of London. She spent her childhood in Hardy country and has been known to extol the virtues of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy’s most enduring novel. But when I said that I wanted to see the Dorset landscape that the books inhabit — and that now inhabits a new film of Far From the Madding Crowd — she was skeptical, thinking only of a childhood characterized by rural isolation, a lack of fashionable friends and traffic jams caused by slow-moving tractors.
But in the 20 years since she left, Dorset has had a reversal of fortune, aided in 2001 by the Jurassic Coast earning UNESCO World Heritage status for its proliferation of fossils and the geological story told by the cliffs. It is now popular with tourists interested in more than just Victorian tragedies about fallen women and men who can’t rise above their station. And though the landscape is certainly recognizable from Hardy’s time, the area is increasingly home to stylish little hotels, fashionable shops and pubs and restaurants serving modern British fare.
We based ourselves in Bridport — called “Port Bredy” by Hardy — at the Bull Hotel, in a modishly renovated 17th-century coaching house. A fishing and market town, Bridport has been called Notting Hill on Sea by the English press for its tasteful boutiques and restaurants. Its main street is lined with stone and brick Victorian buildings, on our visit connected across the high street by festive bunting.
Since we were there on a market day, we pushed the baby around the stalls selling antiques and local produce, before retreating for a creative cocktail in the luxuriant Venner Bar, supposedly the site of a 16th-century murder, tucked behind the hotel’s ballroom.
For help with our Dorset itinerary, I contacted the Thomas Hardy Society, formed in 1968 to promote the author, as well as tourism to Dorset. This year, the society will commemorate the 175th anniversary of Hardy’s birth on the weekend of June 6 and 7, with a lecture, a “Hardy Walk” through Hardy country and a wreath-laying on Hardy’s grave.
“There is always another character in all Hardy’s novels about Wessex, and that is the countryside,” said Mike Nixon, the society’s secretary. “In a way, Hardy was the first tourist officer for Dorset. And people do come to see the countryside, the towns and the buildings he wrote about.”
Nixon said Hardy pilgrimages began in the author’s lifetime, aided by Hermann Lea’s Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. Compiled with Hardy’s help, the1913 book is a guide to the settings thinly disguised in his novels. I found a yellowing copy in a vintage bookshop in Bridport and used it as my guide. Hardy was born to a builder of modest means and a former domestic servant in 1840 in the tiny village of Higher Bockhampton, about three miles east of Dorchester, the county seat. In 1885, after a nomadic period that included a stint as an architect in London, Hardy settled in Dorchester at Max Gate, an unremarkable twobedroom brick house he designed himself and named for a nearby toll booth.
With his balding head, grey moustache and penchant for drab waistcoats, he was nothing like the handsome blades that appear in so many of his novels. He married a rather dour woman against the objections of her family, and their marriage eventually soured. They never had children but there was a beloved dog named Wessex, or Wessie, a wirehaired terrier known to bite.
His wife eventually moved to the attic of Max Gate, and when she died, he married a much younger woman. He lived at Max Gate until his death in 1928. Max Gate and the thatchedroof cottage he was born in are now well-subscribed tourist attractions. The author’s study, however, has been removed and reassembled in a Hardy wing of the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester.
We started in Dorchester, a town of around 20,000 that lies on the site of a Roman settlement and appears as “Casterbridge” in several of Hardy’s novels, most notably The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the mayor sells his wife to a sailor after too many helpings of “furmity,” an “antiquated slop” of rum-spiked porridge.
“Casterbridge announced Rome in every street, alley and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed the dead men of Rome,” Hardy wrote.
Indeed, while excavating for the construction of Max Gate, Hardy’s builders discovered three Roman graves.
A preponderance of chain stores, though, has robbed Dorchester of its Roman and Victorian charms. The model for the mayor’s house is now a branch of Barclays Bank, and it is hard to imagine Dorchester as the town where the by-then ex-mayor memorably wrestled his romantic rival in a granary with one arm tied to his side to make it a fair fight.
I was not disappointed, however, by the Maumbury Rings — Hardy’s “Ring at Casterbridge” — the remains of a first-century A.D. Roman amphitheatre. “Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind,” Hardy wrote in The Mayor of Casterbridge. It served as an artillery garrison during the English Civil War and was the site of public executions in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The once-imposing earthwork sits rather meekly amid a residential neighbourhood on Dorchester’s outskirts, its neatly trimmed grass now host to Roman re-enactments, though a clandestine rendezvous inside its basin could still go unobserved.
That it sits amid a modern residential neighbourhood is a reminder of the area’s long history and how the area’s past was always present in Hardy’s work.
A five-minute drive southwest of Dorchester is Maiden Castle, the remains of the 47-acre Iron Age hill fort that Nixon said was the site where Sgt. Troy, the freeloading opportunist who performed his military sword exercise for the heroine Bathsheba Everdene, whom he was wooing, in a scene he said was “fraught with Victorian symbolism.”
It took us 15 minutes to scale the fort’s outer berm from where we could see down into the pits between the ramparts, like the one where Bathsheba became “enclosed in a firmament of lights and sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand” as she watched “the marvellous evolutions of Troy’s blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specifically.”
Since there were countless Hardy sites in Dorset, we spent the next day driving between some that were convenient to Bridport. We saw Beaminster — Hardy’s “hill-surrounded little town” of Emminster in Tess — and the nearby Mapperton Estate, where scenes in the new Fox Searchlight film of Far From the Madding Crowd were shot in the Elizabethan manor house’s lovely terraced gardens.
Next we drove up to Cerne Abbas, a village that sprang up around a Benedictine abbey in the 10th century, a version of which appears in The Woodlanders and Tess. We couldn’t miss the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 55- metre-high figure of a club-wielding, muscle-bound hulk cut out of the turf on a hillside and carefully maintained over the years. Its ancient origins are unknown.
In Cerne Abbas we met Will Best, who owns an organic dairy farm that hugs the hills above the village. Best credits the Hardy Society’s inaugural conference in 1968 with a revival in Hardy tourism.
Since Best’s farm is one of the last to grow and supply wheat for use on the thatched roofs of Dorset’s cottages, he was recruited to teach the cast of the new film how to make the large bundles of harvested wheat common in Victorian farming that feature in a pivotal scene. He made such an impression that he was made an extra in the movie.
Best, 67, said he developed an affinity for Hardy when he found a copy of Tess while away at boarding school. “I was really brought back home by it,” he said. “Hardy’s scenes with the country people and the way they speak reminded me of my childhood on the farm.”
Before leaving Dorset, I wanted to stop in Bere Regis, about 20 minutes east of Bridport. The Bere Regis Church had been built and rebuilt on the same site since 1050. It is notable for containing the tomb of the extinct Turbervilles, the “ancient and knightly” family on which Hardy modelled the d’Urbervilles in his most famous novel.
When we arrived at the church it was empty, but the huge wooden door was unlocked, so we entered. There, in the south aisle, was the tomb, now sealed, a sign saying that the worn-out Latin text read that the family of Robert Turberville, who died in 1559, “had been lords of the manor from ancient times.”
Once inside, our daughter needed no invitation to play with the toys left there for the parishioners’ children while my wife and I ate sandwiches bought in Bridport on a pew beneath the famous window with its “heraldic emblems” — the Turberville crest.
We were, for the duration of lunch, lords of the manor. The New York Times