Woolbridge Manor House

[1] It is on the north side of the old Wool bridge, a historic crossing point over the River Frome, now closed to traffic except pedestrians and cyclists due to a bypass and junction.

The Manor was formerly in possession of the Turberville family of Dorset (descendants of George Turberville) until sold in the eighteenth century and it is the inspiration for Wellbridge House—Tess's ancestral home where she and Angel Clare spent their unfortunate honeymoon—in Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles: They drove by the level road along the valley to a distance of a few miles, and, reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the left, and over the great Elizabethan bridge which gives the place half its name.

Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged lodgings, whose exterior features are so well known to all travellers through the Froom Valley; once portion of a fine manorial residence, and the property and seat of a D'Urberville, but since its partial demolition a farm-house.

[2]In the house today, on the first floor landing, remain two seventeenth-century mural portraits, mentioned in the novel as "ladies of the D'Urberville family", Tess's ancestors.

[2][1] A local legend, also mentioned in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, states that a phantom coach crosses the bridge by Woolbridge Manor at night, but only those with Turberville blood can see it.