THOMAS Hardy’s fiction immortalised the area around his home town of Dorchester – but his Wessex was a lot larger than that.

A new book collects pictures of Hardy’s Dorset and compares them with the corresponding scenes today.

The book, Thomas Hardy’s Dorset Through Time, is by Steve Wallis, who works for Dorset County Council as a senior archaeologist.

He points out that Hardy’s semi-fictionalised Wessex went a lot further than the west of the county where he lived.

“He used places that he knew. After he’d done Dorchester and the area around it, he started branching further afield,” he says.

“He even went as far as Oxford for part of his Wessex.”

Poole appears in The Mayor of Casterbridge as Havenpool, the port through which Richard Newson returns to the country. Bournemouth is Sandbourne and figures in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, where the character Angel Clare is struck by the contrast between this “fashionable watering place” and the heathland elsewhere in the county.

Why did Hardy change the names of recognisable places? Steve points out that by doing so, he avoided potentially defaming real people in the towns that inspired him.

“His stories were set within his own lifetime.

“The same families would be within the villages, the same lords of the manor and so on,” he said.

Even today, Steve says, you can follow routes described by Hardy and be impressed by how accurately he wrote about them.

“The first time I read Hardy, I knew he did this but I thought it was quite vague. But you get some passages where he describes places exactly as they are,” Steve Wallis says.

Many of the old pictures in the book were taken in Hardy’s lifetime – he lived from 1840-1928.

Where this was not possible, the photographs chosen were from as soon after Hardy’s era as possible.

Some scenes in the book have hardly changed. Blandford (which was Shottsford Forum in Hardy’s fiction) and Corfe Castle (or Corvsgate) are good examples. Others, such as Poole’s High Street, have changed drastically, and not necessarily for the best.

“Poole is one of those places where, because of redevelopment and war damage, there are some scenes from 100 years ago which are pretty well unrecognisable,” says Steve.

Thomas Hardy’s Dorset Through Time is published by Amberley Publishing at £14.99.