Thomas Hardy's Wessex: Visiting Winterborne Came

Initially, we had trouble finding Winterborne Came, but thankfully, a local pointed us towards the sign in the bushes above.

After walking through a few fields, we entered Winterborne Came where a few people had bungalows:
 

Soon, we caught sight of St. Peter's church which lay beyond what looked like a medieval walled garden.  My friend Dave purred at the latter explaining that the walled garden would have been used to feed the local village community in the past:

In 'The Hardy Way', Margaret Marande (2015: 187) explains that the Dorset dialect poet William Barnes, who was the "rector of St. Peter's from 1862-1886" and a good friend of Hardy, is buried in St. Peter's "churchyard beneath a large Saxon-style cross, south of the tower".
 

Hence, it wasn't difficult to find Barnes' grave:

The William Barnes Society has an interesting Facebook site which shows some of its members attending a service inside St. Peter's church.  However, the church is no longer regularly used for religious services, to which Margaret Marande (2015: 187-189) laments that it "is somehow sad, once the heart of a small but live community", while now it is "deserted and all but forgotten except for occasional services and pilgrims to the Barnes grave".

For me, it was important to visit Winterborne Came, as I'd recently read that William Barnes seems to have shared or even influenced Hardy's profound empathy towards human suffering (a central quality of Hardy's narrative voice, of course).

We visited Winterborne Came in early June and the beautiful church was open to take a look inside.
 

Margaret Marande (2015: 189) explains that the church "is usually open during the day from May to September", and that Hardy walked to it "from Max Gate on numerous occasions and visited the grave".

There was definitely a sense of stillness and a feeling of long, lost (in some ways, better) time inside the church:

Not far from St. Peter's church, we had a quick look at Came House, a "large mid-eighteenth century Palladian building  . . .  situated in rolling parkland" (Marande 2015: 189):

We also saw an interesting-looking, deserted building:

But unfortunately, we forgot to go looking for Came Rectory where Hardy had sometimes visited William Barnes "before and after the completion of Max Gate in 1885" (Marande 2015: 189).