The mayor the merrier – David Shanks on a visit to Thomas Hardy country

Thomas Hardy wrote of Casterbridge, his imagined name for the Dorset county town of Dorchester, as having virtually “no suburb” – “or transitional inter-mixture of town and down”. It stood “like a chessboard on a green tablecloth”. The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley stack “and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town clerk”.

It’s not so very unlike that today – even if you don’t half-close your eyes – though Hardy’s famous novel The Mayor of Casterbridge dates from 1886.

The current good humoured Mayor of Dorchester, Alistair Chisholm, walked me – almost my legs off – along a Roman border path by the river Frome. On the right are fields and to the left across the river, is the town. Population is in the early twenty thousands, many like us using sticks, but lots of youngsters tend to be working in say London. So, in spite of layers of prehistory and history – the Romans and the Normans – this south of England strip remains among the most prosperous parts of Britain.

Dorchester is still surrounded by a Roman border – and has an amphitheatre, Maumbury Rings, which could hold 14,000 to gawk at hangings or other erstwhile diversions. Its horseshoe shape has long grass now. Walks took me along narrow streets of charming pretty old houses. Light-night traffic reminded me of when Covid first hit. (My room was on the front of “The Casterbridge” on High Street.)

‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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One aim of the Independent mayor, who likes the Greens, is to preserve the bucolic Hardy rural beauty of this town, to which no motorway runs. He is campaigning against a plan to build on Hardy’s cornfields, adding perhaps 4,000 houses – “but with absolutely no guarantee of truly affordable social housing to meet the current and growing needs of local people”.

Because of dwindling profits farmers may well feel drawn to sell land for building.

We got on: so from now he is Alistair. Like me, he hates Brexit and hopes someday Britain will rejoin the EU; he knows Martyn Turner from their Queen’s University Belfast days.

He drove me west through Poundbury, former Prince Charles’s model urban project, which already extends Dorchester outside the Roman border and has already added up to 3,000 houses; it is still under construction. A statue of the queen mother is at the centre. Quite in passing, the mayor mentioned he had recently met King Charles III.

I had mentioned to Alistair, at 77 three years my junior, that I had abandoned an early plan to visit Highclere Castle – Downton Abbey – just to see the outside of it – because I hate inside tours. This impractical detour to the north would have meant a £200 taxi, besides I have seen it a hundred times on TV.

My genial host rose to this and instead included in our drive the fine Stafford House, home of Julian Fellowes, the Downton creator.

In our wide-ranging discussions the mayor told of another scheme to “welcome” asylum seekers, who are constantly crossing the Channel precariously in small boats. He wants to unite with the mayors of three other Dorset towns, including coastal Weymouth and Portland to the south. Without any local consultation, London has been preparing a pontoon for Portland Port which will be able to house 500 of these poor unfortunates. You’ll hear about the newly arrived Bibby Stockholm barge on the news, I suspect.

But I had to remind myself: I came here out of love for Thomas Hardy and his imagined version of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. The Mayor of Casterbridge tells the story of the hapless Michael Henchard who gets drunk and sells his wife. Remorsefully he swears an oath to avoid alcohol for 21 years, during which he rises to become a prominent corn dealer and then mayor.

An important theme is the relationship – first very warm, between him and a young Scotsman Donald Farfrae, who after leaving Henchard’s employ as manager, also becomes a corn dealer and mayor. The relationship turns to rivalry. There’s a dreadful physical fight; a question of paternity. The novel is subtitled “The Life and Death of a Man of Character”, which confused me because Farfrae seems to deserve the title more than the mercurial Henchard, who dies in disgrace and isolation, in the care of a simpleton former employee.

A lot happens in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In the introduction to my edition (which ignores that subtitle) Michael Irwin of the University of Kent, suggests that a certain “raggedness in some aspects of the narration” could be due to revisions of plotlines, and stylistic changes. He perceptively points to newspaper serialisation and the author’s wish “to get an incident into almost every week’s part”. Not cliffhangers exactly. Hardy himself wrote self-critically that he may have himself damaged recklessly his story, which was apparently serialised more than Hardy’s other dozen or so novels.

Hardy was a beautiful writer but not a man of few words. He was not one to use two or three words when 22 or 33 would do. His deep love of nature was suggested by visiting the gardens of his childhood home, a thatched two-story cottage a few miles outside town, and that of Max Gate, his home built for him by his musical stonemason father and brother. The National Trust keeps them beautiful.

Hardy’s mother Jemima had ambitions that Thomas would rise above his builder family background; so he became an architect, and had a clever hand in designing Max Gate. Apart from five less than happy years in London, Hardy spent all his life in or around Dorchester, until his death at 87 in 1928.

My long longed for (but too short) trip ended up in three short episodes: nightmare journey there (thanks partly to delays by Aer Lingus/Emerald Airways); dreamtime because of Alistair; and just a bad dream getting home, courtesy of our former national airline.