St Michael’s Church, Stinsford

When Hardy died on January 11, 1928, aged eighty-seven, his ashes were taken to Poets’ Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey.

However, the writer’s heart is buried in the graveyard of a mediaeval church down a quiet lane in Stinsford, near Dorchester.

It shares the same grave as Hardy’s first wife Emma, and is near the final resting place of his second wife Florence, who died in 1937. Hardy had been baptised in St Michael’s Church and used it as the model for Mellstock Church in “Under The Greenwood Tree”.