Excavators found the bones at Dorchester prison in Dorset, where a 16-year-old Hardy watched the public hanging of Martha Brown after she was convicted of murdering her violent husband. The Victorian jail was closed in 2013 and sold by the government to developers, who are now in the process of building 190 new homes on the site. If they are, they are almost certain to be the remains of Martha.” 
 
 He said a full examination of the prison site should take place. “I think more work needs to be done, and we need to make sure that whatever remains are found there are given a proper, decent burial. Martha is an important historical figure because of the Hardy connection.” 
 
 Hardy was among a crowd of up to 4,000 people who watched Brown’s hanging in August 1856. Seventy years later, he wrote to a friend, Lady Hester Pinney, expressing his shame at being present, adding: “My only excuse being that I was but a youth, and had to be in the town at that time for other reasons.” 
 
 Still, he could not resist describing the hanging in vivid detail: “I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.” 
 
 Tess of the d’Urbervilles was published in 1891. It was on the eastern side of the prison and is 20 yards to the North Square gate which is where the executions took place and where Thomas Hardy watched Martha hang. In handwritten notes of conversations she had with Hardy, Lady Pinney described how she "sat over the open fire at his house hearing him talk of Martha and Tess, who had so much in common, just as if they were in the next room. “His sympathy for these unhappy women was wonderful,” she wrote. A spokesman for developers City and Country said their preference would be to leave the remains undisturbed. “It is the intention that any human remains which may be disturbed by the proposal development will be adequately recorded and removed prior to disturbance, with the intention to rebury the remains following appropriate assessment and analysis.” 
 
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 Mike Nixon, the secretary of the Thomas Hardy Society, said more work should be done on the site before it was developed; “Hardy is well known for storing up experiences and using them decades later. When he wrote Tess, I’m sure he had in mind Martha Brown. We believe the remains should be respected, whoever they belong to, but it would be neat if they were shown to be those of Martha.” 
 
 A spokesperson for Cotswold Archaeology, which carried out the survey, said: “At this stage, it is not possible to determine whether the remains are male or female, as the remains have not been removed for recording or analysis.”
– Thomas Hardy fans, prepare to geek out. Archaeologists may have uncovered the remains of a woman whose execution is said to have inspired the death of the main character in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Back in 1856, a 16-year-old Hardy was among a crowd of 4,000 that gathered to watch Martha Brown's public hanging at Dorchester prison in Dorset, England. The prison has since been closed to make room for a housing development, and archaeologists conducting a routine survey because of the site's history turned up the still-unidentified remains, including a skull. Only eight convicts were executed and buried at the prison before 1878, reports the Telegraph. "I don't think it would be too difficult to establish if any of the remains are those of a woman," a Dorset-based filmmaker tells the Guardian. "If they are, they are almost certain to be the remains of Martha." Like Tess, Brown was executed for murdering a man who had wronged her: in Brown's case, her violent husband. "I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back," Hardy said of her execution some 70 years later. "Hardy is well-known for storing up experiences and using them decades later," says a rep for the Thomas Hardy Society. "When he wrote Tess, I'm sure he had in mind Martha Brown." The housing developer is resisting requests to allow a more thorough dig that might definitively answer the question about the remains, and the government's senior archaeologist in the county will make the final call on whether it's necessary. (Archaeologists recently found the site of an 1826 murder.)