The hamlet of Plush really lives up to its name. It’s got rose-trimmed cottages with thatch as thick as a ploughman’s biceps. There’s a skittering stream festooned with forget-me-nots, and a come-hither pub advertising pork belly in cider gravy. The vague scent of cow ordure lingers on the breeze. Plush isn’t just in Dorset, it’s in Dorzzzzet, deep in the bucolic bosom of Thomas Hardy country.

I have come here to walk in the footsteps of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy’s great antiheroine. Why? Because Tess is gorgeous and misunderstood. And because, for me, nobody writes about our countryside like Thomas Hardy. He turned Dorset into the heart of Wessex, and Wessex into the archetypal English landscape, a place of sensuous pastures and restless heaths that resist the civilising hand of man.

As you can imagine, I’m chuffed to bits with Plush. And yet something is wrong, as the villager David Glass points out.

“If Tess came here today, she’d get a shock,” he says, pulling up a chair beside the cavernous inglenook at Corner Cottage. “Plush was done up after the war by the local squire. Until then it was a complete dump.”

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Presumably that’s why Hardy changed its name. A century ago, when he turned Plush into Flintcomb-Ash, the village was a “starve-acre place”, where the woebegone Tess scraped a living grubbing turnips from the dreary fields around.

We join her at a low ebb. Ravished by her rakish cousin Alec, then abandoned penniless by her new husband when he discovers her past, she resolves to walk west across the Dorset downs to beg help from her father-in-law, the vicar of Emminster. This is the walk I’ve come to re-create, starting right here, beside Corner Cottage — it’s where Tess paused in the “pearly fore-dawn” to huddle for warmth under the eaves. Aptly, the gable end now has a hot-air vent to service David’s Aga.

Hardy’s Emminster is really the stone town of Beaminster, and in the novel Tess sets out at 4am on a frozen December morning, “the ground ringing under her feet like an anvil”. She plans to walk there and back in a day — a blistering 30 miles according to Hardy; more like 35 when I measure it on OS Explorer map 117 with a bootlace.

I’ve already decided I’m going one-way only. A track beside the Brace of Pheasants spirits me up onto Church Hill — and immediately I feel like I’m in the undiscovered Dorset. The path bounces through tufty pasture, blissfully “unimproved” since Hardy’s time, where wild orchids and lollipops of pink clover spring among the turf. I’ve been walking for 10 minutes, and already I’ve found the West Country version of an alpine meadow.

The views are heart-achingly lovely. I can see Bulbarrow, one of the highest hills in Dorset, with its Iron Age fort on top. Three buzzards are quartering over Penny Farthing Wood, and a skylark burbles among the gorse. I feel closer to Tess up here — hurrying on in her soft grey woollen gown and battered boots — than I will all day.

All the way to Little Minterne Hill I come nose to snout with cattle, which regard me with their usual indifference. This high ground would never have supported dairying in Tess’s day, only turnips and stubble. Fertilisers and friesians have brought changes. To Tess, their black-and-white coats would have looked every bit as garish as my bright red Helly Hansen jacket.

The best of my walk is to come, as I climb High Stoy, Hardy’s favourite hill, onto the 900ft rim of the downs. This is a “vast escarpment” indeed — the spine of Dorset — with balcony views over Blackmore Vale, the happy valley where Tess grew up. On her walk she sees “fields below of less than half a dozen acres, so numerous that they looked like the meshes of a net”. The description still holds water today.

Now we reach a turning point in Tess’s odyssey — Cross-in-Hand, a fist-like standing stone beside the road, where she meets her old seducer, Alec, now an evangelical preacher. He makes her swear on the cross that she will never tempt him again.

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