by Jonathan Lorie
The red carpet has been rolled out and the actors are strolling in. At the cinema door they pause for photos beside posters of Carey Mulligan and Martin Sheen. From the far end of the Georgian street you can hear the bleating of sheep.
Welcome to the Dorset premiere of Far From The Madding Crowd, held in the small town of Bridport as a thankyou for the hundreds of local people who acted as extras or helped as assistants when this latest film of the great novel by Thomas Hardy was shot nearby. To their delight, the film’s producer Andrew Macdonald announces from the stage: ‘Dorset is the star of this film along with Carey and the other actors.’
As well as enjoying the film, I’ve come to Dorset to explore the world that inspired this tale. Few writers are as steeped in their landscape as Hardy, and much of his modern appeal lies in his evocation of traditional rural life. In Far From The Madding Crowd he revived an ancient Saxon name for this area – Wessex – and the name has stuck. He called it ‘a partly real, partly dream country’ and I have come to find it.
Bridport itself is a handsome market town whose red-brick streets still bustle with stalls on a Saturday like today. Hardy set his poignant love story Fellow Townsmen here, renaming it Port Bredy, with final scenes in the 500-year-old Bull Hotel. These days the Bull is a boutique hotel with a superb restaurant, but it retains the feel of the grandest coaching inn in town – all bare floorboards, flickering fires and roaring bars, with a rococo ballroom complete with chandeliers. No wonder the Crowd actors stayed here while filming.
I drive north from Bridport to Toller Down, where Hardy’s novel starts. It’s a pretty drive among steep hills and hidden farms to a vast downland 800 feet high and swept by keen winds. This is Hardy’s ‘Norcombe Hill’, where the humble farmer Gabriel Oak first proposes to the wonderfully headstrong Bathsheba Everdene. Here he loses his flock of sheep over a cliff edge and with them his hopes of prosperity and a wife. Today it certainly feels like a wild enough place for calamity.
Below the ridge is the lush valley of the river Frome, and at its source the unchanged village of Evershot. This is deepest Dorset, with Tudor cottages of amber stone and a village shop with an old bow window. Hardy liked to drink by the inglenook hearth at the sixteenth-century Acorn Inn, which he called The Sow And Acorn in his stories: today its elegant four-poster bedrooms are named after his places and characters. Almost next door is Tess Cottage, a white thatched cabin fronted with bluebells, where Hardy’s doomed heroine stopped to rest in Tess Of The d’Urbervilles.
Then I drive down the valley to Dorchester – ‘Casterbridge’ in Hardy’s tales, a county town of fading Georgian grandeur. It’s built along a road so straight it can only be Roman: roots around here run deep. At the end of the high street, a statue of Hardy sits brooding over the town. On the flint face of the Barclays Bank, a plaque explains that the Mayor of Casterbridge lived there. The Victorian gothic Corn Exchange is where Bathsheba amazed the male farmers by daring to sell her wheat by herself. Next door is the Dorset Museum, which houses the original furnishings from Thomas Hardy’s study.
Wandering inside, I am astonished. Here’s the leather-topped desk where Hardy wrote, scattered with dip pens. There’s a leather satchel with his drawing instruments, from the early days when he worked as an architect restoring local churches. Beside the mantelpiece is the fiddle that he played at village parties as a boy.
The study was transferred intact from Hardy’s house on the edge of town, Max Gate. I head there next. It’s a dull red-brick mansion with turrets at each corner and a croquet lawn in front. He designed it himself in the 1880s, the years of his literary success. Beside the hedge stands a shepherd’s hut on wheels, just like Gabriel’s. The drawing room has chintz chairs beside a vast dark fireplace. The dining room has heavy chairs and flame-coloured walls. In the attic is a separate suite of rooms that his first wife Emma moved into halfway through their marriage. This does not feel like a happy home.
And it wasn’t. Here Hardy welcomed the luminaries of late Victorian and Edwardian society, lionised by them as the guardian of an ancient spirit of rural England. But the marriage turned sour and there were rumours of an affair with his cousin. Locals still talk of a pregnancy with a milkmaid. For all his creation of powerful female characters, Hardy himself was not a good husband. His later poetry, written after Emma’s death, is shot through with grief and regret. That is, of course, its greatness.
I drive two miles out of town, to the other, simpler end of Hardy’s life story. In the hamlet of Lower Bockhampton is a yellow stone building surrounded by flowers. It is the village school that he attended as a child, where the alluring outsider Fancy Day came to teach in Under The Greenwood Tree. Was she, perhaps, modelled on his teacher? Did he, perhaps, always have a sense of a world beyond these woods?
Along the lane I find the old village pump with its crank handle, now disused. And opposite is my hotel for tonight, Yalbury Cottage. It’s named after Yalbury Wood, where the fictional Fancy’s father Geoffrey the gamekeeper lived, and this was house once a shepherd’s home. Today its 300-year-old brick walls and shaggy thatch hide an exquisite small hotel where an oak-beamed restaurant serves local food with a cosmopolitan twist. I think Hardy might have approved.
Next morning I chug up the lane to Higher Bockhampton. Here he was born in 1840, in a simple cottage below Thorncombe Wood. His family were local stonemasons and builders and they used their front yard to store timber and the limestone that makes Dorset villages shine like gold.
I approach the cottage through the wood, where paths have been laid through the landscape of his childhood, past sighing beech trees, sinister sink-holes, a winding Roman road and an eerie pond on a hill where a wild white pony stands and stares at me, whinnying. All these things Hardy captured in the lyrical poems that he wrote throughout his life. His first recorded poem, Domicilium, describes this house and its surroundings.
Beyond the wood is the wilderness of Black Heath, a bleak stretch of gorse and stone and stunted trees. This was Hardy’s prototype for the terrifying wasteland of Egdon Heath, which engulfs his characters in The Return Of The Native. Even today you can feel the power of the landscape to define whole lives.
I wander back to the serene world of Hardy’s boyhood home. It’s a solid cottage of timeworn brick and thatch, with tiny leaded windows and roses over the door. Inside there are simple rooms with whitewashed walls and bare stone floors. The parlour has a tall wooden settle warmed by a smoking hearth, a mantlepiece displaying two white china dogs, and an old wooden dresser that’s filled with willow pattern plates. In Hardy’s day this room was used for family parties and the country dances which he wrote about so lovingly. Perhaps it was here that he first heard the fiddle and yearned to play it himself.
Upstairs are three small bedrooms – one for the parents, one for the girls and one for the boys. The latter was Hardys into his twenties. It holds a brass bed and a tiny whitewashed table, replica of the one at which Thomas wrote his first four books. He sat in this room, staring out of this small window, dreaming of other lives and possibilities. The breakthrough novel, which allowed him to leave home, marry Emma and abandon local building for the life of a writer, was Far From The Madding Crowd.
I turn back for Dorchester and a final link to the man himself. This afternoon a local amateur dramatic society, the New Hardy Players, are in rehearsal. They’re preparing a stage version of The Return of the Native, to be shown on the lawn of the house at Max Gate.
Hardy himself loved the stage and in 1908 allowed a local group to call themselves the Hardy Players. One of their number was a baker’s daughter from Dorchester, Norrie Woodhall, whose mother was said to be the original for Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Norrie acted under Hardy’s direction at Max Gate, as a teenager in the 1920s. She remembered him as a kindly and amusing man who was rather taken with her sister who played Tess. When he died in 1928 the group disbanded. But in 2005, for Norrie’s 100th birthday, she asked that the group be revived. It performs to this day, raising money for local charities and for the purchase of a collection of Hardy’s manuscripts by the Dorset county museum.
Norrie was the last person to have known the great author, but she died in 2011. Instead I ask the New Players’ director, Howard Payton, how it feels to perform Hardy in his own home town.
Howard smiles through his white beard. “It’s very powerful to perform Hardy at Max Gate. Out on that lawn, you’re standing under the window of his study. You only have to look up and you think – he’s there.
“And do you know what?” Howard grins. “When I proposed to Alison, I used the words of Gabriel Oak. But Alison gave me a better answer than Bathsheba gave to him.”