It’s written on the wind

THOMAS HARDY’S Wessex may have been a land of his imagination, but the topography was far from fictional. So closely was it based on the real countryside that the author annotated a map of Dorset, now in the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester, showing the places from which he drew inspiration. In 1901, the literary critic William Archer recalled a walking tour of this landscape, checking off the sites with Hardy, in an interview for The Pall Mall Magazine.

‘I climbed up to Shaston, in the tracks of Jude and Sue, went on to Sherton Abbas, and met Grace Melbury and Winterborne in Sheep Street: down through the country of the Woodlanders to Casterbridge: on to Budmouth, looking for (but not finding) Overcombe of on the way.’ At which Hardy pointed out: ‘You would have had to turn eastward from the main road.’ His novels are rooted in the earth of his home county and it’s hardly possible to visit south Dorset without seeing it through his eyes.