Parnham Estate’s plan
Behind the proposal is the neighbouring Parnham Estate. Parnham House, a Tudor mansion with later Nash improvements, was devastated by fire in 2017, leaving much of it a hollow ruin. Its new owner – James Perkins – seeks “exceptional” planning permission for a housing estate as an “enabling development” to fund restoration. Yet doubts abound. […]
A landscape written into Hardy
The land under threat carries deep literary resonance. Hardy drew on it repeatedly, weaving real topography into his fictional Wessex. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Beaminster appears 17 times as “Emminster.” Hardy described it as “the basin in which Emminster and its vicarage lay” and later as “his father’s hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor […]
Hardy’s Beaminster under threat from luxury housing scheme
In September, Dorset Council will be asked to approve an extraordinary proposal: to cover 25 acres of open countryside with 83 private houses. The site lies outside Beaminster’s designated settlement area and within the Dorset National Landscape, a nationally protected area whose legal and policy safeguards specifically rule out such development.