Town in Dorset, England
Dorchester
A Roman amphitheatre built on a Stone Age henge, a Victorian novelist's fictional Casterbridge and a 1834 trial that shook Britain: Dorchester packs in a lot.
Key information
- County
- Dorset
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 19,000 (2011 Census)
- Known for
- Thomas Hardy, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Roman remains, Maumbury Rings, Poundbury
- Famous people
- Thomas Hardy, William Barnes, George Loveless
- Football clubs
- Dorchester Town (the Magpies)
About Dorchester
The town that Thomas Hardy turned into Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy was born in a thatched cottage a few miles east, apprenticed to a Dorchester architect as a teenager, and later turned the town into Casterbridge, the setting for The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Walk the streets and you can still spot the real places behind the fiction. Hardy designed his own house, Max Gate, on the edge of town, and lived there from 1885 until his death in 1928. He wrote Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure under its roof. His heart is buried at nearby Stinsford, while his ashes went to Westminster Abbey, a famously split farewell. A statue of him, by Eric Kennington, stands at the top of High West Street. The Dorset Museum holds a reconstruction of his study, complete with the desk where he worked.
A Roman town with a Stone Age secret
The Romans called the place Durnovaria and gave it walls, a grid of streets and a water supply. Most of the walls have disappeared, but a short section survives near the Top o' Town roundabout, and the tree-lined avenues known as the Walks largely follow the old wall circuit. A Roman town house with mosaic floors survives close to County Hall. The real showpiece is Maumbury Rings. It began as a Neolithic henge, was reshaped by the Romans into an amphitheatre, and was later used as a gun emplacement in the Civil War. Public executions were held there too, including that of Mary Channing, a young woman put to death for murder. Just to the south sits Maiden Castle, one of the biggest Iron Age hillforts in Europe, dug out in the 1930s by the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler.
Where six farm workers faced the judge
In 1834 six agricultural labourers from the village of Tolpuddle were tried at Dorchester's Shire Hall. Their offence was swearing an oath as members of a friendly society, which the authorities treated as a crime. The sentence was transportation to Australia. The public outcry was enormous, and the men were eventually pardoned and brought home. They became the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and their story is a foundation stone of the British trade union movement. The historic courtroom survives at Shire Hall, with the dock still in place. The town had form here. In 1685, Judge Jeffreys held the Dorchester sessions of his Bloody Assizes after Monmouth's Rebellion at the Antelope Inn. He stayed at the building now known as Judge Jeffreys's Lodgings.
The Dorchester that crossed the Atlantic
In 1630 a group of Puritan settlers sailed from Plymouth aboard the Mary and John, encouraged by Dorchester clergyman John White. They founded a settlement in what is now Massachusetts and named it Dorchester after their home town. It is now a neighbourhood of Boston. At home, the town rebuilt itself after a fire in 1613, and the Georgian and Victorian brick and flint you see today grew from that later era. The poet and schoolmaster William Barnes, who wrote in Dorset dialect, preached at St Peter's Church, where his statue stands outside.
Ale, a prison and a very new old town
Dorchester was once a brewing town. Eldridge Pope first brewed a strong barley wine called Thomas Hardy's Ale in 1968, forty years after Hardy's death. It was inspired by his description of Dorchester beer in The Trumpet-Major (1880), and still has a following among collectors. The brewery closed in 2003. Dorchester Prison, now closed, looms in Hardy's story too. In 1856 the teenage Hardy watched the hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, an experience he never forgot. On the western edge, Poundbury has been growing since 1993. The King, then Prince Charles, commissioned it on Duchy of Cornwall land, and the architect Léon Krier planned it. It is a deliberately traditional urban extension, with houses, shops and workplaces mixed together.
Football, markets and a magpie
Dorchester Town FC are known as the Magpies and play at the Avenue Stadium. The town's Wednesday and Saturday markets continue a long tradition of trading in a county town surrounded by farmland. The town is compact, so Roman walls, Hardy sites, the Shire Hall courtroom and the museum can all be reached on foot in an afternoon.