The Blackmooor Vale. Source of photograph: Tess of the D'Urbervilles in the Anniversary Edition of the Wessex Novels, 1920, based in part on previous editions and the photographs of 1912. Frontispiece, facing title-page.
"'Amid the North-Eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemoor or Blackmoor . . . in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry' lay the village of Marlott, typical of Marnhull, the home of the Durbeyfield family. Marnhull is six miles from Shaftesbury, and contains a fine church of eighteenth-century Gothic [sic]. The original name of the village was Marlhill, deriving that name from the white clay or marl which is abundant there, and which, after exposure to the air, hardens into freestone. The church and many of the houses are built of it"
[These remarks by the anonymous editors often seem to be based on Thomas Hardy's Wessex (1913) by Herman Lea -- PVA].
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman. New York & London: Harper & Brothers, 1912.
Last modified 24 August 2002