"Weatherbury" is a most interesting place, although somewhat altered since _Far from the Madding Crowd_ was penned. The old malthouse, wherein the villagers gave such a warm welcome to Gabriel Oak on his taking service with Bathsheba, has vanished completely, but the church, of which a proposed rebuilding of an Elizabethan chancel on the lines of a larger original chancel has caused a fierce and bitter controversy in the press, has met with little molestation. It contains the Athelhampton Chapel, with a panelled entrance arch, in which are some remarkable monuments and brasses, the former of which include a magnificent recumbent effigy in alabaster, with a "vizored salade", and a fluted shield, commemorating a member of the Martin family, who lived at the neighbouring Athelhampton Hall, a fine ancestral home, and the "Athel Hall" of the _Wessex Poems_. The Norman font in the church is worth inspection, as also are the fifteenth-century panelled roof of Spanish chestnut of the nave, and the Carolean gallery where Gabriel Oak sang in the choir. Very simple were the old services in these village churches, with the farm hands attending service on Sunday afternoons as regularly as they went to work on Monday mornings. Now and then maybe a bucolic rustic would doze off to sleep, until his slumbers were disturbed by the beadle; and many of the old natives can remember when this ecclesiastical official would rap his long wand of office on the skull of a sleeping rustic, with a crack that echoed through the sacred edifice. In the north porch of the church Sergeant Troy passed the night after Fanny Robin's funeral. A short distance away is Lower Waterson, "a hoary building of the Jacobean stage of classic renaissance", and the home of Bathsheba Everdene, where the great "Shearing Barn", so delightfully described by Mr. Hardy, may still be seen, although the novelist had in his mind's eye the far more spacious and magnificent tithe barn at Abbotsbury. While at Waterson it is worth while to mount Waterson Ridge, the scene of _Time's Laughingstocks_, a poem that appeared in the _Fortnightly_ of August, 1904.