Higher Bockhampton

In the woods above Higher Bockhampton, reached by a series of narrow lanes and a 10-minute walk, is a major shrine for devotees of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s Cottage is surrounded by the trees of Puddletown Forest, a setting he evoked so magically in Under the Greenwood Tree. The delightful thatched cottage and gardens are now owned by the National Trust and the rooms are furnished much as they would have been when the great novelist was born here in 1840. Visitors can see the very room in which his mother gave birth only to hear her child proclaimed still-born. Fortunately, an observant nurse noticed that the infant was in fact breathing and so ensured that such classics of English literature as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Return of the Native saw the light of day. This charming cottage was Hardy’s home for the first twenty-two years of his life until he set off for London to try his luck as an architect. In that profession his record was undistinguished, but in 1871 his first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published. An almost farcical melodrama, it gave few signs of the great works that would follow but was sufficiently successful for Hardy to devote himself thereafter to writing full time.