Thomas Hardy’s cottage

On the way back from the Small Woods AGM in Devon, I visited the cottage where Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and lived as a young man. His novel “The Woodlanders”, about people living and working in West Country woodlands, inspired the name of the Woodlanders Facebook group, and I’ve always wanted to visit places associated with the book.

The cottage is at the end of the lane that runs through the small village of Higher Bockhampton, and is now in the hands of the National Trust. It is a wide red brick house with a thatched roof and a large garden that was used as a yard by Hardy’s father, a builder. The interior photos show the main parlour which was used for cooking too, the bedroom where Hardy was born (with a cot), and his bedroom (with a desk in the window). The garden included an apple orchard, and a shed now has a cider press and other building and agricultural tools. Cider is especially relevant to The Woodlanders as the main character, Giles Winterbourne, was a cider maker during the autumn. It’s necessary to book yourself onto one of the tours of the building to visit, and you can’t enter the garden until your appointed time. You can see quite a lot over the fences though if you don’t have time for all that.

The village is bounded to the south by Thorncombe Wood, now a Dorset County Council nature reserve. Hardy knew this wood as a boy. It’s now a 64 acre mixed woodland, with stands of tall conifers but mostly broadleaves (oak, beech and sweet chestnut), all the way from young natural regeneration to big standards. A couple of the local herd of Dartmoor ponies were grazing. In the southern peninsula of woodland is an area of coppice in rotation, with coupes at different stages separated by low hurdle fences. There’s also a ring kiln for making charcoal and thicker hazel logs. I think this was the work of the local volunteer group, the Furzecutters.

The small car park at the council’s visitor centre was full when I arrived, and I turned to Plan B. To the east of the village is the Forestry Commission’s Puddletown Forest with plenty of parking along the road through the forest. I parked up and walked through the tracks and roadways to get to the village. One very notable feature is the wide, flinty Roman Road.

After visiting the cottage and Thorncombe Wood, I returned back through the forest to the car and drove back to Cheshire. The lady who showed us round the cottage recommended I try “Under the Green Wood Tree”, Hardy’s second novel. I decided to listen to Audible’s version read by Robert Hardy in the car. Leaving aside the story itself and thinking about the woodland elements (not that I am obsessed with woodlands at all…), it has a lot less of the woodland flavour and details of The Woodlanders. The magic of that book, for me, is that it presents an image of a lost time when parts of England looked like a forest nation. The village of Higher Bockhampton wasn’t quite that even in Hardy’s time, but lots of the elements are there even now.