Explore Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire For many, DORCHESTER,
county town of Dorset, is essentially Thomas Hardy’s town; he
was born at Higher Bockhampton, three miles east, his heart is
buried in Stinsford, a couple of miles northeast (the rest of
him is in Westminster Abbey), and he spent much of his life in
Dorchester itself, where his statue now stands on High West
Street. The town appears in his novels as Casterbridge, and the
local countryside is evocatively depicted, notably the wild
heathland of the east (Egdon Heath) and the eerie yew forest of
Cranborne Chase. The real Dorchester – liveliest on Wednesday,
market day – has a pleasant central core of mostly seventeenth-
century and Georgian buildings, though the town’s origins go
back to the Romans, who founded “Durnovaria” in about 70 AD. The
Roman walls were replaced in the eighteenth century by tree-
lined avenues called “Walks”, but some traces of the Roman
period have survived. On the southeast edge of town, Maumbury
Rings is where the Romans held