Neolithic henge under Hardy's home in Dorset gets protection

When the author Thomas Hardy was writing Tess of the D'Urbevilles 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.

-  Esther Addley

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

Though invisible at ground level after millennia of ploughing, the enclosure still survives under Hardy's garden. It has now been given protection by the government as a scheduled monument.

Hardy had known nothing of the site's significance when he began building a house of his own design in Dorchester, although the discovery of Roman and Iron Age burials during construction led him to think it was an ancient burial ground. He did find a large sarsen, however, which he called a "druid stone" and re-erected in his garden.