When the railway bought the part of the churchyard to facilitate the expansion of the railway station the old displaced grave stones were relocated to a small area.

Over time this has had nature reclaim it for its own as the tree has grown through the stones.

Thomas Hardy, the well known poet, was before his fame as a writer earning his keep in London as an architect and one of his jobs was to oversee the relocation of the graves and their contents during the railway expansion and so this is now known as The Hardy Tree.