Hardy establishes Egdon Heath as the setting. It is based upon Wessex, England, where he grew up. Wild and uncivilized, filled with rounds, hollows, thorns, moss, stumps, barrows, and furze, one can barely penetrate it except by following the road cutting through it. Untouched by the vicissitudes of life experienced by the villages, the people, and even the natural elements of field and river, Egdon Heath remains the same. The heath takes on a vitality of its own and becomes a character in the story, an animated but desolate expanse of terrain challenging its occupants, which Hardy calls “a face upon which time makes but little impression” (9).

An old man walks down the road, supported by his walking stick. A man of substance and authority, he might be a naval officer. He peers ahead and sees a peculiarly lurid red van. The driver, who walks beside the van, is himself red from top to toe, a “reddleman” who supplies reddle, a red ochre, used by farmers to mark their sheep. The narrator describes him as a “nearly perished link between obsolete forms of life and those which generally prevail” (13).