Other Events
Sunday 1st July 2012 The Dorset Gardens Trust Garden Day at WATERSTON MANOR
This promises to be an exciting all-day Sunday event for lovers of gardens and beautiful country. The event is at the kind invitation of the owner, who has been developing the garden since acquiring the property in 2007. Thomas Hardy used Waterston in "Far From The Madding Crowd" as the model for Bathsheba Everdene's Weatherbury Farm.
Dr Tony Fincham, the Thomas Hardy Society Chairman, will be giving an illustrated talk entitled 'Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy and Waterston Manor' at 11.30 am (provisional time).
Admission from 10am - 5pm, entry £5 (children free), no dogs. The Dorset Gardens Trust organises Garden Days on alternate years. More background about the Trust and its activities can be found at www.dorsetgardenstrust.co.uk .
PRESS RELEASE
by theDorset Gardens Trust
Registered Charity No 1000743 Company No 2498049
The DGT 2012 GARDEN DAY
will be at WATERSTON MANOR
(DT2 7SP, B3142 west of Puddletown)
on Sunday 1st July
from 10am – 5pm, entry £5 (children free), no dogs.
Waterston Manor is on the site of an earlier property recorded in the Domesday book as belonging to King Harold and passing to William the Conqueror. The current house was originally Elizabethan, but alterations through the centuries and a fire in 1863 have resulted in a medley of styles. The formal gardens were laid out by architect Percy Morley Horder in about 1912. They consist of a several linked but visually separate formal areas leading to water meadows, woodland and a walled orchard. Notable features include a pollarded lime walk, a densely planted sunken garden partially enclosed by yew hedges, and the water garden that extends out from the classically styled east front of the house. Small bridges across the River Piddle lead to a woodland walk. The novelist Thomas Hardy used Waterston in “Far from the Madding Crowd” as the model for Bathsheba Everdene’s Weatherbury Farm
The DGT organises Garden Days on alternate years, the two most recent being at Chideock Manor (nr Bridport) in 2010 and at Thornhill (Stalbridge) in 2008. The funds raised at these events enable the DGT to continue its work in protecting the historic parks and gardens of Dorset and in making grants to schools to help children learn about the value of plants in our lives.
More background about the Trust and its activities can be found on our website at www.dorsetgardenstrust.co.uk.
CONCERT
"THE LIFE AND LOVES OF THOMAS HARDY" At the Elgar Birthplace in Worcester. UK
Sunday 20 May at 3pm.
The concert will be an exploration of the poetry, song and narrative of Thomas Hardy with settings by Gerard Finzi.
Full details of the concert at www.musictherapyworks.co.uk/news
COURSES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
FRIDAY 22nd JUNE 2012 Spatial Perspectives: Literature and Architecture, 1850 - Present.
Keynote: Professor Douglas Tallack (University of Leicester).
CALL FOR PAPERS
This interdisciplinary conference seeks to foster a dialogue between literature and architecture by bringing together papers that encompass the diversity of thinking about these two disciplines and the ways in which they engage and interact. This will be the first conference to examine the intersections of architecture and literature globally over a broad timeframe. We warmly encourage contributions from practising architects, architectural historians, creative writers, and scholars of literature. An edited collection of conference proceedings is planned. Abstracts of 300 words for 20 minute papers to literature.architecture@gmail.com by Friday 2nd March 2012. We look forward to receiving your proposal.
The conference is organised by Nicole Sierra (University of Oxford) and Terri Mullholland (University of Oxford)
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29th JULY - 4 AUGUST The Novels of Thomas Hardy
A week-long residential summer school course
The course offers the chance to live and study at Christ Church, one of Oxford University's most prestgious colleges. Courses are open to everyone and there are no previous study requirements. We welcome students of all backgrounds and ages in a warm and collegiate environment.
Dr Charles Boyle charles.boyle@conted.ox.ac.uk
CONFERENCE
Friday 29th June - Sunday 1st July 2012 THE SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER SOCIETY WEEKEND
At the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, Dorset. UK
Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing demands renewed investigation. An expert musicologist as well as a versatile novelist, short story writer and poet, she was a controversial international figure.
The concert programme at 3pm on Saturday 30 June consists of some of the music Warner edited for the Tudor Church Music project, compositions by her friends and some settings she herself composed of poems by Thomas Hardy, 'Subalterns' and 'She, at his Funeral'.
Full programme details at www.townsendwarner.com Members of the THS are entitled to the concessionary price for the symposium on Friday 29th 'Revisiting Sylvia Townsend 1893-1978'