Hardy’s Cottage, Higher Bockhampton

Start your day at the thatched cottage where Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840.

Owned by the National Trust, the author’s birthplace is in the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, three miles from Dorchester, and was built by his great-grandfather.

The secluded property has a rustic charm, but as Hardy wrote in a poem, aged sixteen, “Our house stood quite alone” and “nightly bats would fly about our bedrooms”. He claimed “heathcroppers”, probably wild ponies, “were our only friends”.

Hardy lived in the cottage until he was thirty-four, writing many of his early short stories there, as well as the novels “Under The Greenwood Tree” and “Far From The Madding Crowd”.