Hardy's Cottage, Higher Bockhampton
The cottage where Thomas Hardy was born on 2nd June 1840, at Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester. Built by Thomas Hardy's great-grandfather in 1801, for the author's grandfather, a master mason. Thomas Hardy's father later extended the building. Hardy lived in the cottage until 1862, and his earliest novels were written here: Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree, and Far from the Madding Crowd.
The property is now looked after by the National Trust, and they've laid out a pretty, rambling cottage garden in front of the house, with roses, geraniums, foxgloves and poppies. To the side of the house; a neat vegetable garden, with fruit bushes and apple trees, and orderly rows of runner beans and broad beans and spuds.
The tiny house was heaving with visitors, and at first I thought photography was a lost cause; but tourists, like cars, tend to travel in clumps, and with a bit of patience there were moments when the crowds thinned and I could snatch a quick visitor-free photo.
The sitting room. Two fiddles on the table. Thomas Hardy's father and grandfather were keen musicians.
Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.
She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.
Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!
The Self-Unseeing
An embroidery box on a table near the window. The furnishings and ornaments are not original to the cottage, but examples of what might have been seen in a middle class Dorset cottage of the time.
Kitchen with range and bread oven. There's a little scullery adjoining with a great many large clay vessels on the floor, and yokes hanging on the wall. A reminder of how much work was involved in simply getting water into the house from the well in the garden.
Desk, in the small office where Hardy's grandfather and father would have worked.
A Staffordshire figure of General Pelissier, (presumably commemorating his success in ending the Siege of Sevastopol rather than his earlier infamous brutality in Algeria).
There are two sets of stairs to the bedrooms on the upper floor - one set steep and narrow, and the other little more than a fixed ladder.
Not sure what Mrs Hardy would have made of all these visitors passing through and a pair of bloomers hanging from the bed end...
