Tragic Romance · Amesbury, Wiltshire
Stonehenge (Tess of the d'Urbervilles finale)
Where Hardy's fugitive lovers Tess and Angel spend their last night together, Tess asleep on an ancient stone, before her capture — one of literature's most haunting doomed romances. (Note: Hardy's plot involves violence; on this map we feature only the Stonehenge love-and-loss scene, not the crimes.)
The story
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) ends here, at night, with the exhausted Tess lying down to sleep on one of the great stones — an "altar", Hardy calls it — before the police close in at dawn and take her to be hanged. The novel's subtitle, A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, was a deliberate provocation: its plot turns on Tess's sexual violation (a scene Hardy wrote to be ambiguous between rape and seduction, and still disputed by scholars), and Hardy insists on her purity against a society that would deny it. He had to bowdlerise the book for serial publication in The Graphic, cutting the seduction and the baby and — famously — replacing a scene of Angel carrying dairymaids in his arms with one in which he wheels them across a flooded lane in a wheelbarrow. Reviewers called it immoral anyway. After his estranged first wife Emma died in 1912, Hardy poured his remorse into the Poems of 1912–13, some of the finest love poetry in English — written, as ever, too late.
Sources
- Wikipedia
- The Paris Review
- Britannica
- Poems of 1912–13, Wikipedia
- English Heritage (Richard of Cornwall at Tintagel)
- Historic England
- Cornwall Guide (Tristan Stone)
Nearby on the map
The oldest chalk figure in Britain, a 360ft Bronze Age horse leaping across the scarp above the dry valley called the Manger. Local folklore made the hill a fertility landscape — couples still climb it on midsummer nights — though the documented rite is the seven-yearly 'scouring' festival of the 1700s.
Documented + folkloreRoyal LiaisonOsborne House (Victoria & Albert's private idyll)East Cowes, Isle of Wight · EnglandThe seaside palace Albert built so the royal couple could be, in Victoria's word, 'snug' — a marriage of genuine passion the Queen recorded with un-Victorian candour. Her bathing machine survives; so do the nine children as evidence of the idyll.
Documented historyFolk Rite & FertilityCerne Abbas GiantCerne Abbas, Dorset · EnglandBritain's largest chalk hill-figure, a 180ft naked club-wielder whose 35ft phallus made him a fertility icon; folklore holds that a couple who conceive on the figure will be blessed with children. Optically Stimulated Luminescence testing dated him to AD 700–1100; per NT senior archaeologist Martin Papworth, 'he was created very early on, perhaps in the late Saxon period, but then became grassed over and was forgotten.'
Documented + folkloreSpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.