“Wildeve’s Patch, as it was called, a plot of land redeemed from the heath, and after long and laborious years brought into cultivation. The man who had discovered that it could be tilled died of the labour: the man who succeeded him in possession ruined himself in fertilising it. Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci, and received the honours due to those who had gone before.”
A casual talk with the small farmer who has taken the place reveals the fact that this soil is a hard taskmaster and yields a poor recompense. The heathery hill facing it is described exactly as it is in nature:
“The front of the house was towards the heath and Rainbarrow, whose dark shape seemed to threaten it from the sky. . . .”
“It was a barrow. This bossy projection of earth above its natural level occupied the loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.”
The soil at the back of the house is better, which indeed it could well be without being even then particularly good. It slopes towards the river, at what is described in the book as “Shadwater Weir,” where the drowned bodies of Wildeve and Eustacia were found:
“The garden was at the back, and behind this ran a still deep stream.”
The village of Tincleton, the “Stickleford” of casual mention in some of the short stories, is one of about a dozen cottages, clustering round a little church and school; and with presumably a few dozen more dwellings in the neighbourhood of the wide common on which Tincleton stands, to account for the existence of that school and that church. Past it and Pallington, whose hill and hilltop firs, known as Pallington Clump, are conspicuous for great distances, we turn to the left and explore a portion of Egdon Heath towards Bryan’s Piddle and Bere Regis. Everywhere the wilds now stretch forth and seem to bid defiance to the best efforts of the cultivator, but down at the hamlet of Hurst, where water is plentiful, there is an ancient red-brick farm of superior aspect, and yet with a thatched roof—an effect oddly like that which might be produced by a gentleman wearing a harvester’s hat. It is obviously an old manor-house, and besides showing evidences of former state, has two substantial brick entrance piers surmounted by what country folk, in their native satire, call “gentility balls.”
Such gentility in the neighbourhood of wild, uncanny Egdon wears, as Mr. Hardy would say, “an anomalous look.” The heath is more akin with Adam than with his descendants:
“This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness—‘Bruaria.’ Then follows the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. ‘Turbaria Bruaria’—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters relating to the district. ‘Overgrown with heth and mosse,’ says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.”
“Here at least were intelligible facts regarding the landscape—far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untamable Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilisation was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.”