ABSTRACT
The modern world’s discovery of ancient civilization through excavation was chronicled extensively in the pages of such Victorian periodicals as the middlebrow general interest weekly The Illustrated London News.2 Readers relished the florid reports of how ‘the spade brought to light tomb after tomb, and how each tomb
yielded its golden hoard’.3 But Hardy’s focus on the ancient vicinal highway and Rainbarrow – the collective name for the three peripheral tumuli rising above the heath – says much about his unique imaginative assimilation of scientific and humanistic pursuits. He was dedicated to reconstructing the course of man’s collective past while implying a complex confluence of ancient residues and modern energies.
