UK - From Hardy Country: Digging Up Tess

"What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?"

"Yes, dearest," he said. "They have come."
--
"It is as it should be," she murmured.
--
"I am ready."
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Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze.
--
from 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles,' Thomas Hardy. Chapters 58-9

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Julian Fellowes has raised concerns over plans to build houses on the burial site of the murderess who inspired Thomas Hardy to write Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

The Thomas Hardy Society has been monitoring plans to build 185 homes on the site of Dorchester Prison, where Martha Brown, the last woman to be hanged in Dorset, is buried.

Brown, who killed her abusive husband, was executed in 1856, a hanging which a 16-year-old Hardy is believed to have witnessed.

Lord Fellowes, who is president of the Society, called on developers to exhume and reinter her remains elsewhere.

The writer and Conservative peer told the BBC: "It'd be very disrespectful not to exhume all the bodies.

"Although they were largely executed criminals, they were human beings."
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