Profile of the setting

The land chosen by Hardy for his novel to develop is Wessex, a large agriculture region which designates the south-western counties of England, principally Dorset and which is also the author’s native place. The Vale of Blackmoor “is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it...”(ch. V)
It is common-knowledge that nature and the landscapes are playing a very important role in Hardy’s novel, as they project the feelings of the characters on a background of eternity and generality.
In order to understand why Thomas Hardy had chosen Stonehenge to all the places in the world, one must know a little about the history of this magnificent monument.
The ancient monument lies on the Plains of Salisbury, or “The Great Plains” (as Hardy identified them on his map) and dates from the Neolithic (late Stone Age) and Bronze Age. It is the most celebrated of the megalithic monuments in England and the most important prehistoric structure in Europe. Stonehenge consists of four concentric ranges of stones. Within this outermost range is a circle of smaller bluestones enclosing a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of bluestones capped with lintels. Within these trilithons (an assemblage of two uprights capped by a lintel) stands a slab of micaceous sandstone known as the Altar Stone.
The entire assemblage is surrounded by a circular ditch 104 m (340 ft) in diameter. On its inner side the ditch rises into a bank within which is a ring of 56 pits known as Aubrey holes (after their discoverer, the antiquarian John Aubrey) and used at a later stage as cremation burial pits. On the north-eastern side, the bank and ditch are intersected by the Avenue, a processional causeway 23 m wide and nearly 3 km long, bordered by a ditch. Near the entrance to the Avenue is the Slaughter Stone, stone that may originally have stood upright. Almost opposite, and set within the Avenue, is t