Year 13 students recently went on a trip to Dorset to learn more about the life and work of Victorian novelist and poet, Thomas Hardy.

Students met a range of Hardy experts, published authors, historians and enthusiasts, as they visited an exhibition at the Dorset Museum, Hardy's birthplace, and finally, the house that Hardy designed and lived in until the end of his life - Max Gate.

Our students were full of questions and heard many a colourful anecdote about this complicated creative, and his provocative works. The hard realities of lives of the rural working class came to life in the collections of farming equipment, and period attire - including the yoke that milkmaids and milkmen would wear to carry pails of milk. Students also experienced first hand the beautiful wild and farmed landscape that inspired Hardy's pastoral novels and beautiful nature poetry, as we walked Hardy's gardens in the autumn sunlight.