Far From the Madding Crowd: January 2010

Wednesday, 6 January 2010

Bleak and Desolate

When we watched the news this morning, it appeared that the whole of UK was under ten feet of snow, not here in the deep South, just a dusting of snow. We went to Cranborne, to the garden centre for coffee and it was snowing quite hard there. On our way back home, we stopped at Knowlton Church to get some bleak pictures of this ruined church. Knowlton Church, Wimborne, is a ruined Norman church which stands in the centre of a Neolithic henge earthworks. The church fell into disuse when the parishioners of a nearby village were killed by the plague in 1348. It became ruined in the 18th century.

My Blog

I have taken the title of my blog from Thomas Hardy's fourth novel 'Far From the Madding Crowd' which he wrote in 1874. He took his title from Thomas Gray's poem 'Elegy written in a Country Churchyard' completed in 1750. Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset where he lived for most of his life and where he based the stories in his novels. The word 'madding' means frenzied and there is a sense of freedom I get being out in the countryside and being close to nature away from the frenzied atmosphere of the towns and cities. I live in Dorset and like Thomas Hardy, it is where I have lived for most of my life, my blog is mostly about nature in Dorset. I am a member of the Dorset Wildlife Trust. I will include my garden and anything of interest about the natural world in Britain.