A short holiday, August 2022
A few months ago my mind drifted back to the summer of last year, when on a whim I’d booked us a short break to St Juliot’s, in the hills above Boscastle, Cornwall. This year I’ve become a little addicted to making my own photozines, and although I’ve published one this year that has been printed commercially (which you can buy here), I’ve hand made several others, just for myself. There was one evening in particular during last August’s holiday that I knew I had to make a zine about, and it’s taken weeks and weeks to get it right.
I’d booked a few nights at The Old Rectory, knowing that long before its development into a fine B&B it was the rectory where in the late 1860s, Thomas Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, who was living there; the couple were married 4 years later. Hardy was working as a young architect, helping plan for the restoration of St Juliot’s church, and Emma was employed as the conductor of the church’s music. They moved to Hardy’s Dorchester and were married for 38 years. Emma died in 1912, and Hardy’s remorse at never bringing her back to Cornwall, led him to commission a stone monument to be erected inside the church the following year.
The first evening after we’d arrived at the rectory, my wife suggested we walk to see the church. It had been a very beautiful summer’s day and we seemed to have the landscape to ourselves as we wandered down the quiet lane. The church held several surprises, which my photographs will reveal, but the best was undoubtedly the engraved glass windows, commissioned by the Hardy Society and completed by the artist Simon Whistler. The engravings interpret scenes from Hardy’s life as both architect and established author, but also reproduce the opening lines of three of his poems from Hardy’s own handwriting. In low-angled, rather intense summer light they proved hard to photograph, but I hope the images here will give a flavour of how they appear in the church. The poems I identified as Under the Waterfall, When I Set out for Lyonnesse and Beeny Cliff, and in my zine I have added the full text of each poem to the pages adjacent to the images.
We walked back slowly, taking in the great sweep of the glowing hills surrounding the Valency valley. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the effect of this landscape on Hardy and Gifford 160 years or so before us.
The zine is complete and I believe it’s the best I’ve made so far. There’s no market for something like this: too few would be interested and it would prove too expensive to try and sell hand made copies. But it’s been a wholly engrossing exercise in completing a project, in sequencing and visual storytelling, and for this zine, in creating a new format that I’m very happy with (if you’re interested, the zine measures 162mm x 210mm in portrait format). Much abuse has been screamed at my printer (or more specifically the printer driver) which for over a week simply refused to understand that it’s supposed to actually print documents in the format that they appear in the print preview, and not shrink everything over to the left!! But I’m clearly over that now. [Not.] Anyway here are three mobile phone photos of the finished zine (sorry for the sofa pattern behind them – it was getting late when I decided to include them). Thanks for reading.
Terry Hurt Photography 
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