Puddletown is a village in Dorset

Dorset

Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, 5 miles east of Dorchester in the River Piddle

River Piddle

The River Piddle or Trent or North River is a small rural Dorset river which rises next to Alton Pancras church and flows south and then south-easterly more or less parallel with its bigger neighbour, the River Frome, to Wareham, where they both enter Poole Harbour via...

 valley

Valley

In geology, a valley or dale is a depression with predominant extent in one direction. A very deep river valley may be called a canyon or gorge.The terms U-shaped and V-shaped are descriptive terms of geography to characterize the form of valleys...

. The village has a population

Population

A population is all the organisms that both belong to the same group or species and live in the same geographical area. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals...

 of 1,177 (2001), of which 30.3% are retired.

Puddletown was featured in the novel Far From the Madding Crowd

Far from the Madding Crowd

Far from the Madding Crowd is Thomas Hardy's fourth novel and his first major literary success. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a wide readership. Critical notices were plentiful and mostly positive...

by Thomas Hardy, where it was renamed as the village of Weatherbury.

Church

The church of St Mary is mainly late medieval with an earlier core. Features of interest include the beaker-shaped font, the panelled roof to the nave, and the 17th century box pews, pulpit and gallery. There are also a number of 15th and 16th century monumental brasses and some stained glass by Ninian Comper

Ninian Comper

Sir John Ninian Comper was a Scottish-born architect. He was one of the last of the great Gothic Revival architects, noted for his churches and their furnishings...

.

Notable residents

Tryphena Sparks

Tryphena Sparks

Tryphena Sparks , born in Puddletown, Dorset, the youngest child of James and Maria Sparks, was Thomas Hardy's cousin and possible lover. She was the inspiration for Hardy's poem Thoughts of Phena at News of Her Death....

, Thomas Hardy's cousin, who was the inspiration for Hardy's poem Thoughts of Phena at News of Her Death.

External links

• Census data