Place:Stinsford, Dorset, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Stinsford (#17 on map) is a civil parish and a village in Dorset, England, one mile east of Dorchester. The parish includes the settlements of Higher Bockhampton and Lower Bockhampton. The name Stinsford may derive from stynt, Old English for a limited area of pasture. In the UK census of 2011 the parish had a population of 334.

The parish has five large country houses - Birkin House, Frome House, Kingston Maurward House, the Old Manor House (Elizabethan) and Stinsford House. Much of the land in the parish is now occupied by Kingston Maurward College, a further education college.

There has been worship at Stinsford since at least Norman times, but the only remaining parts of the earliest structure are the sculpture of St Michael, inside the west wall of the south aisle of the church, and the restored Purbeck Marble font.

St Michael's was the local church of novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and he was baptised here. Stinsford is the original 'Mellstock' of Hardy's novels Under the Greenwood Tree and Jude the Obscure.

Hardy's heart was buried in the churchyard in 1928, alongside the grave of his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who died in 1912 and his second wife, Florence Dugdale, who died in 1937. The churchyard also contains the grave of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who died in 1972 and had arranged for his burial to be close to Hardy whom he admired.