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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
National
Esther Addley

Dorset ‘Stonehenge’ under Thomas Hardy’s home given protected status

A boulder on a manicured lawn outside of a large house
A sarsen in front of Max Gate, Dorset. Thomas Hardy designed the house and lived there for more than 40 years from 1885. Photograph: National Trust/Alamy

When the author Thomas Hardy was writing Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891, he chose to set the novel’s dramatic conclusion at Stonehenge, where Tess sleeps on one of the stones the night before she is arrested for murder.

What the author did not know, as he wrote in the study of his home, Max Gate in Dorchester, was that he was sitting right in the heart of a large henge-like enclosure that was even older than the famous monument on Salisbury Plain.

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