This was my third year in a row doing a 6-7 day trip round Dorset looking at Thomas Hardy sites, and, thankfully, this year, we got to Marnhull village and got to have a look at St. Gregory's church, the model for one of the many heart-wrenching scenes in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
In The Hardy Way: A 19th-Century Pilgrimage, Margaret Marande (2015: 96) explains that after Tess' pleading, the parson allows the burial of Tess' dead child to take place in a nettled part of the church graveyard.
Hence, it was only natural to find a trip to St. Gregory's church highly poignant.
Inside, the church was very grand, it was hard to imagine it was in a village:
Having said this, Marnhull (Hardy's Marlott) is a massive village spread over loads of land.
The two buildings below also caught our eyes. I think that the first one is the old rectory, the model for where Tess pleads with the parson to allow her dead child to have a Christian burial in the church graveyard shortly after Sorrow's death, with a transfigured Tess having baptised Sorrow herself the night before the latter's death:
Not sure about the significance of the second building below:
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