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The banks by the lane are white with snowdrops and a mistle thrush sings in the bare orchard. The writer Thomas Hardy grew up in the thatched cottage at the end of this track. His earliest poem, Domicilium, describes the house as it was in 1800 when his great-grandfather built it. The gardens were wilderness and the lane “a narrow path shut in by ferns”. This cottage, where Hardy wrote Far from the Madding Crowd, is the starting point for a 220-mile hike, the Hardy Way. I’ve walked round much of Dorset on this literary footpath, but I’m here now on a more personal pilgrimage.
The last time I visited this cottage near Dorchester was with my mother, Kim Taplin, who died last year. This month, Dorset-based Little Toller publishes a new edition of her first book, The English Path. It’s about footpaths in English literature. Exploring the work of nearly 200 authors and artists, Kim shows the cultural importance of paths in connecting us to each other and to nature. Paths were crucial for work, love, worship and inspiration. “Without them,” she says, “Hardy could not have written, nor Constable painted, what he did.”
A love of Hardy was one of the reasons Kim moved to Dorset, where she spent her final years. He is one of six writers she singles out as a rich source of footpath imagery. Since she died, I’ve been following paths linked with these writers as a kind of footsore memorial: tramping through Cambridgeshire bluebell woods near Helpston, where the poet John Clare lived, and climbing the long grassy banks of Maiden Castle, a huge iron age Dorset hill fort that inspired the novelist John Cowper Powys.
Hardy’s cottage, in the tiny hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, opens from March to October. Inside the simply-furnished rooms where the author grew up there are interactive elements: you can play the violin, darn socks by the parlour fire and eat apple and clove compote in the white-washed kitchen. The independently run Under the Greenwood Tree cafe in the nearby visitor centre serves homemade comfort food.
Around the cottage, there are flashes of colour in the wintry woods: pale yellow primroses, a blue and coral nuthatch, a scarlet-capped goldfinch. There’s a smell of fallen leaves and fresh wild garlic. In a chapter of The English Path called Sounds and Scents and Seeings, my mum writes about the sensory pleasures of walking. Climbing through Thorncombe Wood, I pass beech and holly. Hardy’s early novel Under the Greenwood Tree starts with the voices of different trees: “the holly whistles as it battles with itself; … the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall”. Carved on a bench by hilltop Rushy Pond is the word “Listen” with onomatopoeias on upright posts: yaffle, churr, buzz, warble… The trees around are full of robins and badger-striped twittering coaltits.
Walking on, there are patches of gnarled heather and coconutty gorse. This heathland appears in Hardy’s novels, especially The Return of the Native where Egdon Heath is a brooding almost-sentient force “like man, slighted and enduring”. Across the brown and purple heath, he writes, “the white flints of a footpath lay like a thread”. The landscape is dotted with bronze age burial mounds, known locally as rainbarrows, ancient markers with a view across the vales among pines and wild ponies.
The loop of paths I’m following, partly on the Hardy Way, passes two rural churches. The poet William Barnes (1801-1886), another of Kim’s path-rich writers, was vicar here for several decades. The hamlet of Whitcombe, five miles meandering south from Higher Bockhampton, looks suitably Hardyesque. Sheep are grazing on the mounds of a deserted village near the thatched shearing barn.
Inside Whitcombe church, there are bat droppings and medieval murals: a faded mermaid combs her hair near a wayfaring St Christopher. Posters of Barnes’s dialect poems decorate the walls. Competing with the road outside I can still hear “naisy-builden rooks”, chattering sparrows, and a “blackbird, whisslen in among / The boughs…” A mile west, over chalky fields, Barnes is buried by the little church at Winterborne Came. The William Barnes Society holds events in both churches.
Hardy’s poem The Last Signal marks the death of Barnes, his friend. The poem opens on the track I’m climbing now, where the mud is pitted with deer prints: “Silently I footed by an uphill road.” Near the Celtic cross that marks Barnes’s grave are banks of budding daffodils, furled garlic leaves and ivy-smothered trees where woodpeckers are drumming.
On the outskirts of Dorchester, I reach Max Gate, the house Hardy built and lived in for his last 43 years, writing Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and The Mayor of Casterbridge in its pine-shaded study (open March to October, £11, children £5.50). Casterbridge was Hardy’s name for Dorchester, where the author’s presence is inescapable. Heading back into town, there’s the Trumpet Major pub and suburban roads with names such as Bathsheba Terrace and Farfrae Crescent. On Dorchester’s High East Street, Hardy fans could stay at the King’s Arms, with its handsome Georgian bow windows, now stylishly revamped (doubles from £94.50, room-only). Hardy often dined here and I eat an excellent Sunday lunch.
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As a young architect, Hardy worked on a new vestry for medieval St Peter’s, a few steps up the street with a statue of Barnes outside. The Dorset Museum, next door, has the world’s largest collection of Hardy-related stuff: pens, books, letters, paintings, his christening bonnet, violin, spinning top, and a reconstruction of his study at Max Gate. Near the end of the road, an elderly bronze Hardy sits among verdigrised ferns.
Next day, I head out to Stinsford to visit the church where Hardy’s heart is buried (the rest of him is in Westminster Abbey). Through the rushy water meadows where Tess meets Angel Clare, I reach atmospheric St Michael’s with its Saxon saint and stained-glass Hardy memorial. There are words carved by the church door from Hardy’s poem A Darkling Thrush, which contrasts bleak winter twigs with the bird’s “full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited”. A mossy waterside stroll from the church leads to the formal gardens of Kingston Maurward (free, open daily) and there’s time for tea in the Barn & Cafe before my bus to the station.
I’ll be back next month, with my brother, to walk more Dorset footpaths, from my mum’s old bungalow in Bridport to the field near Beaminster, where she lies buried. There, among cowslips and flowering blackthorn, we can look out at the wide green view and listen to the birdsong. Kim led the way in loving paths and poetry. In the last photo I took of her, a month before she died, she is walking on the Dorset coast beside a misty sea with a long line of footsteps stretching out across the beach behind her.
Some transport was provided by GWR
The English Path by Kim Taplin is published by Toller Books (£14). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
