Hardy & Archaeology: The Shadow on the Stone

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Hardy & Archaeology: The Shadow on the Stone

Hardy & Archaeology: The Shadow on the Stone

As part of Dorchester's inclusion in the CBA Festival of Archaeology 2025, THS Chairman and Academic Director, Mark Damon Chutter, will give a lecture at Dorset Museum on Hardy & Archaeology talking about the incredible finds made under Thomas Hardy's home at Max Gate, when the great author was undertaking work on the property.

The circular enclosure is a neolithic site, made up of ditches and pits, some of which contain sarsen stones covering human remains and others have walls inscribed with rare Neolithic spiral designs. Evidence uncovered suggests it is one of the earliest identified archaeological sites in Dorchester, being between 5,500 and 5,800 years old. On the advice of Historic England, the site is now protected as a scheduled monument.

In 1891, following work at Max Gate, a sarsen stone was uncovered. It took seven men to retrieve the stone from the ground after which Hardy placed it in his garden. He named it the Druid Stone and further excavations in the late 1980s revealed another sarsen stone. Both stones have been re-erected in the garden and are included in the scheduling.

Today, the Druid Stone today can be seen to the east of the lawn. The poem The Shadow on the Stone finds Hardy sensing the presence or ghost of his first wife Emma Lavinia Gifford.

The Shadow on the Stone

I went by the Druid stone
That broods in the garden white and lone,
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows
That at some moments fall thereon
From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,
And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders
Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,
Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,
Though how do you get into this old track?’
And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf
As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see
That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision
A shape which, somehow, there may be.’
So I went on softly from the glade,
And left her behind me throwing her shade,
As she were indeed an apparition—
My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

Co-ordinated by the Council for British Archaeology, the Festival offers hundreds of events nationwide, organised by museums, heritage organisations, national and country parks, universities, local societies, and community archaeologists.

The Festival of Archaeology will take place between 19 July to the 3 August 2025.