The old wooden signpost points not to roads but to footpaths - leading to Puddletown, Lower Brockhampton, Rushy Pond and, further down the lane, to Higher Brockhampton. Thomas Hardy's thatched cottage is at the end of the Higher Brockhampton lane, snug among beech trees and firs, on the edge of a Dorset heath. An old quince grows over the porch with cowslips, primula and buddleia straggling among flower beds bordered by tiles taken from the old lean-to.
The house, built by Hardy's great-grandfather, started off as a small but adequate dwelling with a flagstone sittingroom where neighbours came to dance, with the young Hardy playing the fiddle. The cottage also contains an office, where his father and grandfather did their accounts, a kitchen with a large oven and two bedrooms upstairs. (The privy was outside and water came from a nearby well.)
A third bedroom had been added earlier with the parents' room decorously separating the boys from the girls, for eventually there were four in the family - choir practices, christening parties, dancing and picnics.
Poverty and rural hardship, however, were never far away and feature regularly in his Wessex novels.
At six, the young Tom started school, walking a mile each way to a small private school in Lower Brockhampton where he learned Latin and how to play the fiddle. Later, he transferred to school in Dorchester and at 16 was articled to a local architect.
He was by then an accomplished artist and aspiring poet. It was in his bedroom, which he had all to himself for the first 11 years of his life until his brother Henry was born, that he did his writing, sitting by the window which overlooked the garden. Here, he wrote four novels, including Far From the Madding Crowd, and it was the success of this book which allowed him to give up his architecture and settle to writing. By then, he had met Emma Gifford and the two were married in 1874. Hardy was 34 with a string of romances already behind him and quite a few still ahead.
He wrote about his meeting with Emma in an early poem:
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away
The Hardys moved to London and later returned to Dorchester to Max Gate, the house which Hardy himself designed.
It was a visible display of his success and never quite replaced the warmth of the family cottage. The marriage broke up and Emma died in 1912, her death ironically inspiring some of Hardy's best poetry.
His subsequent marriage was happier, though the philandering continued into his 80s.
In the cottage is a picture of Gertrude Bugler, an amateur actor and wide-eyed local beauty, young enough to be his granddaughter but much favoured by Hardy to perform in his plays.
This was because she had the right Dorsetshire accent, he explained. "Tom could fall in love very easy," the custodian told me.Hardy died in 1928. His ashes are in Westminster Abbey but his heart is interred in the neaqrby Stinford Church, the church in which his father and grandfather played violin and cello at services. Local lore has it that a local dog ran off with the writers heart and that of a deer is interred in its place.
Hardy's birthplace, Higher Brockhampton is 15 minutes drive from Dorchester, Dorset, in England. This a National Trust property and is closed on Fridays and Saturdays.
Stinsford Church is half-way between the cottage and Dorchester