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I’ve spent my working life as bookseller, guide marketer, writer and now creator, so it was in all probability inevitable that I’d lean closely on literature for my guide Actual Dorset. Fortunately for me, writers have continuously turned to Dorset for his or her inspiration.
Chief of those after all is Thomas Hardy. He stamped his character over his concept of Wessex, reviving an historical kingdom, and giving cities and villages new names. Dorset was the main target for Hardy’s creativeness and his presence is all over the place – in museums, bookshops, on blue plaques. Each city appears to have been a movie set for a Hardy adaptation. In a considerably overliteral transfer, his coronary heart is buried at Stinsford, simply east of Dorchester. However there are numerous extra writers price exploring, all with their very own visions.
You would possibly start a literary tour of Dorset in its north-east, on Cranborne Chase, the chalkland that borders Hampshire and Wiltshire. Now an Space of Excellent Pure Magnificence, it’s marked by the traces of historical earthworks and formed by its designation as forest – for searching – which held till the early nineteenth century. WH Hudson selected a home simply over the border in Hampshire’s most westerly village, Martin, when he was writing A Shepherd’s Life, first printed in 1910. Initially from Argentina, Hudson described Cranborne Chase’s downlands and wildlife, and likewise the agricultural folks he met on his travels. He wrote that he hoped that by committing them to paper he would possibly lay to relaxation the ghosts of his creativeness.
Youngsters’s creator Angela McAllister as soon as lived in Hudson’s cottage and informed me {that a} century after his dying devotees nonetheless make their solution to his previous residence, entranced by his singular imaginative and prescient. Additionally on Cranborne Chase, within the village of Lengthy Crichel, is the attractive, lately restored St Mary’s Church. The adjoining rectory was as soon as the scene of what the biographer Simon Fenwick described as England’s final literary salon, the place writers, musicians, artists and even Greta Garbo stayed. This extraordinary roll name – which included Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, EM Forster, Vita Sackville-West, Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh – generally gave rise to a posh net of non-public relationships. However the home was additionally the place, within the midst of Nineteen Fifties anti-gay hysteria, the seeds of change have been planted, when two of the broader Crichel group, Michael Pitt Rivers and Lord Montagu, have been convicted of gay acts and imprisoned. This led to the Wolfenden report and a change within the regulation, making the small village an necessary web site in LGBTQ+ historical past.
Past Shaftesbury – which Hardy renamed Shaston, and the place he had the unlucky Sue throw herself from a window in Jude the Obscure – is Blackmore Vale. This can be a hidden, little-known place, a patchwork of fields for cattle, punctuated by villages and small cities. William Barnes (1801-1886) was born within the village of Bagber, and spent his life as schoolmaster, clergyman and dialect poet, turning into, as fellow poet Edward Thomas described him, “the mouthpiece of the Dorset carters, cowmen, mowers and harvesters”.
Whereas Vaughan Williams set a few of Barnes’s poetry to music and he was extremely praised by WH Auden, he remained uncared for till comparatively lately. However in her latest verse novel Orlam, the two-times twice winner of the Mercury prize profitable musician PJ Harvey, born and raised in Bridport, west Dorset, used Barnes’s dialect to explain a yr within the lifetime of a woman on the point of maturity, with translations into customary English on the going through web page. Not removed from Bagber, however many years later, Douglas Adams used his expertise of seeing a cottage being demolished in his residence city of Stalbridge as inspiration for the opening chapters of The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy.
Dorset’s west is marked by the intimate, hilly landscapes of the Marshwood Vale, seemed over by Dorset’s (probably legendary) Saint Wite, from her shrine on the magnificent church at Whitchurch Canonicorum, additionally the burial place of Georgi Markov, the dissident Bulgarian author killed by a ricin pellet delivered by the purpose of an umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in 1978.
There’s an air of espionage right here – the Marshwood Vale can also be the supposed setting for the drama in Geoffrey Family’s spy thriller Rogue Male, through which the hero, on the run after trying to assassinate a European dictator, buries himself in a holloway to flee his pursuers. The writers Robert Macfarlane and Dan Richards, together with the artist Stanley Donwood, got here searching for this place for his or her guide Holloway, however disguised the placement, as Family had carried out.
The maze of shady lanes farther east, underneath the large Eggardon hill (talked about in Andrew Younger’s poem A Prehistoric Camp) drew the broadcaster Kenneth Allsop to settle in West Milton within the Nineteen Sixties. Right here he wrote a sequence of newspaper columns, gathered collectively as Within the Nation, detailing in wealthy prose his life right here – his passage on how tough it was to acquire good Dorset Blue Vinny cheese oozes determined enthusiasm. However he was additionally a conservationist, calling for a rebalance with nature and defending his patch in opposition to insensitive growth.
Near Bovington Camp is remoted Clouds Hill, the home the place the archaeologist, author and soldier TE Lawrence made his final residence earlier than he died in a bike accident in 1935. Now underneath the care of the Nationwide Belief, it’s a unprecedented place to go to, the place Lawrence’s spirit is palpable. This advanced character, enigmatic and enormously nicely related, entertained many literary buddies within the upstairs sitting room, though he was typically on much less good phrases together with his army colleagues.
Extra flamboyantly countercultural was the literary set that sprang up within the small, fairly village of Chaldon Herring, between Weymouth and the Isle of Purbeck. This included the extraordinary Powys household: Llewelyn, John Cowper, Theodore (who fictionalised Chaldon Herring in his allegorical novel Mr Weston’s Good Wine), Philippa, Gertrude and their assorted buddies and lovers. Most distinguished was Sylvia Townsend Warner and her accomplice, the poet Valentine Ackland.
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The two women were energetically left wing; Townsend Warner’s feminism found its greatest expression in her brilliant novel Lolly Willowes, in which the heroine, after many years of numbing tedium in London, finds escape and a new life among witches in the countryside. Townsend Warner and Ackland are both buried at Chaldon Herring, this and the charming pub the Sailors Return make it well worth a visit.
Dorset’s east is the conurbation of Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch, all teeming with cultural life. Mary Shelley is buried in Bournemouth, as is her husband Percy’s heart (probably). Although Mary’s original resting place was to be St Pancras churchyard, her son realised that this plot would soon become disrupted by the new railway line. Stranger still was Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo, author of the cult novel Hadrian the Seventh, who came to Christchurch in 1899.
Impecunious and slightly deluded, he made his home in the town for a few years, and attended the Catholic church. It was originally thought that he had created Renaissance-style frescoes of the archangel Michael on the church wall by photographing models leaping in mid-air, making lantern slides from the results, and projecting them on to the walls to trace their outlines. But it seems that this was not his work, which is a pity as it’s a good story.
Threading one’s way back past Poole and its harbour, Canford school is a short (and fascinating) walk from the ancient town of Wimborne Minster. The Booker prize-winning writer Alan Hollinghurst was educated here, as was Derek Jarman, who wrote in his memoir Dancing Ledge about being driven in his art teacher’s Rolls-Royce to Poole’s demolition sites, where they would scavenge for debris – a decorated door by Jarman is on display at Poole Museum.
Dorset, though, is no literary tomb – the county continues to exert its influence on writers and their books. In her debut novel The Whalebone Theatre, a 2022 bestseller, Joanna Quinn created a family and an imaginary grand house, Chilcombe, navigating the crises and opportunities of the early decades of the 20th century, and in doing so reimagined coastal Dorset. She was following a noble tradition. When Hardy created his Wessex it was as a “partly real, partly dream” land – Dorset, but not Dorset.
And that’s what writers seem always to have done: they have shaped Dorset for their writing, but the place has shaped them, too. The land lies in the stories; the stories lie also in the land.
Real Dorset by Jon Woolcott is published by Seren (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com (£9.29). Delivery charges may apply.
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