A further comparison is the setting of the two farms. Talbothays is portrayed as a beautiful place, in a rich agricultural region of southern England — "the valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness, and were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her home — the verdant plain so well watered by the river Var or Froom." We cannot help but be charmed by the life of the dairy, with milking, churning butter, and making cheeses. Furthermore, only positive things happen to Tess while she is there. Flintcomb-Ash, on the other hand, with part of the name being "ash," is mired in mud, rocks, poor conditions, and near starvation. Marian, formerly of Talbothays, has come to Flintcomb for work and calls the new farm "a starve-acre place. Corn and swedes [rutabagas] are all they grow." Alec reappears at the farm to begin his renewed "courtship" of Tess. Farmer Groby's treatment of his hired hands is not as sympathetic as Dairyman Crick's as he tells Tess, "But we'll see which is master here."
Taken as a whole, the villages of Marlott, Emminster, and Trantridge are small towns easily managed by visitors and townsfolk alike. The vast countryside of the novel, the rich farmland or the poorer farm areas, outline an important part of nineteenth-century English agriculture, one where the newly founded Industrial Revolution has yet to take hold. It is upon this framework that Hardy writes one of his best novels.
