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Beech survivor in a swallet hole, Puddletown Forest

The circular pit in this photograph is a 'swallet hole', of which there are hundreds in Puddletown Forest. A swallet is a sinkhole, formed the gradual removal of slightly soluble bedrock by percolating water. Here a beech tree on the edge of a swallet has fallen in, but its roots are still partially intact and it has survived. Its surviving branches have turned upwards forming trunklets.

A swallet hole in this area is the setting for Chapter 28 of Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel "Far From the Madding Crowd". The chapter is entitled "The Hollow Amid the Ferns" and the hollow is described thus: "The pit was a saucer-shaped concave, naturally formed, with a diameter of about thirty feet, and shallow enough to allow the sunshine to reach their heads." Hardy wrote the novel in his cottage at nearby Higher Bockhampton, originally in instalments for a monthly magazine - the locations in the book are fictionalised versions of the settlements between Dorchester and Bere Regis.