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The county town of Dorset, DORCHESTER still functions as the main agricultural centre for the region, and if you catch it on a Wednesday when the market is in full swing you'll find it livelier than usual. For the local tourist authorities, however, this is essentially Thomas Hardy 's town; he was born at Higher Bockhampton, three miles east of here, his heart is buried in Stinsford, a couple of miles northeast (the rest of him is in Westminster Abbey), and he spent much of his life in Dorchester itself, where his statue now stands on High West Street. The town appears in his novels as Casterbridge, and the countryside all around is evocatively depicted, notably the wild heathland to the east (Egdon Heath) and the eerie yew forest of Cranborne Chase. The real Dorchester has an attractive central core of mostly seventeenth-century and Georgian buildings, though the town's origins go back to the Romans, who founded "Durnovaria" in about 70 AD. The Roman walls were replaced in the eighteenth century by tree-lined avenues called "Walks" (Bowling Alley Walk, West Walk and Colliton Walk), but some traces of the Roman period have survived. At the back of County Hall excavations have uncovered a fine Roman villa with a well-preserved mosaic floor, and on the southeast edge of town you'll find Maumbury Rings , where the Romans held vast gladiatorial combats in an amphitheatre adapted from a Stone Age site. The gruesome traditions continued into the Middle Ages, when gladiators were replaced by bear-baiting and public executions or "hanging fairs".

Continuing the sanguinary theme, after the ill-fated rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth (another of Charles II's illegitimate offspring) against James II, Judge Jeffreys was appointed to punish the rebels. His "Bloody Assizes" of 1685, held in the Oak Room of the Antelope Hotel on Cornhill, sentenced 292 men to death. In the event, 74 were hung, drawn and quartered, and their heads then stuck on pikes throughout Dorset and Somerset; the luckier suspects were merely flogged and transported to the West Indies. Judge Jeffreys lodged just round the corner from the Antelope in High West Street, where a half-timbered restaurant now capitalizes on the lurid association.

In 1834 the Shire Hall , further down High West Street, witnessed another cause célèbre , when six men from the nearby village of Tolpuddle were sentenced to transportation for banding together to form the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, in order to present a request for a small wage increase on the grounds that their families were starving. After a public outcry the men were pardoned, and the Tolpuddle Martyrs passed into history as founders of the trades union movement. The room in which they were tried is preserved as a memorial to the martyrs, and you can find out more about them in Tolpuddle itself, eight miles east on the A35, where there's a fine little museum (April-Oct Tues-Sat 10am-5.30pm, Sun 11am-5.30pm; Nov-March closes at 4pm; free).

The best place to find out about Dorchester's history is in the engrossing Dorset County Museum on High West Street (May-Oct daily 10am-5pm; Nov-April Mon-Sat 10am-5pm; £3.50), where archeological and geological displays trace Celtic and Roman history, including a section on Maiden Castle. Pride of place goes to the re-creation of Thomas Hardy's study, where his pens are inscribed with the names of the books he wrote with them. Other museums in town include the Keep Military Museum (July & Aug Mon-Sat 9.30am-5pm, Sun 10am-4pm; rest of year closed Sun; £3; ), just west of Hardy's Monument, which traces the fortunes of the Dorset and Devonshire regiments over three hundred years and offers sweeping views over the town; and a small Dinosaur Museum off High East Street on Icen Way (daily: April-Sept 9.30am-5.30pm; Oct-March 10am-4.30pm; £4.75; ). Best of all is Tutankhamun: The Exhibition on the High Street (daily 9.30am-5.30pm; £4.75; ), a fascinating and thorough exploration of the young pharaoh's life and afterlife through to the eventual discovery of his tomb in 1922. Everything from the mummified remains, complete burial chamber and the celebrated golden mask has been carefully and atmospherically re-created with painstaking detail.