Very far from the Madding Crowd

You couldn't get very much further from the 'madding crowd' than a remote Zagori village in the Pindus mountains of Epirus, Greece (winter population of sixty), but it's the ideal writing and walking retreat.

Watching the DVD of the BBC 1998 production of Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd"  last night (originally a mini-series, nearly three and a half hours in total), one notices many points of similarity between Hardy's Dorset and the Zagori: the stone houses, barns and dry-stone walls, the visibility of shepherds and flocks of sheep (and goats in Greece) in the countryside.

A great production (see review).

Some news of more innovations (electric buses) in Casterbridge.

Hardy's works on film

Dorset film locations

Dorset in the movies

Does anyone know where this BBC production was filmed? It's not listed in the two web pages above concerning Dorset film locations.

Perhaps the answer is in this excellent book, Dorset in Film, by Anwar Brett

Definitions of "madding crowd":

“Madding” (archaic poetic survival?): acting in a frenzied manner —usually used in the phrase madding crowd to denote especially the crowded world of human activity and strife. To be “far from the madding crowd” is to be removed, either literally or figuratively, from the frenzied actions of any large crowd or from the bustle of civilisation.

The origin of the phrase, "Far from the madding crowd":

Thomas Gray
From "Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard”

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds…

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre…

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.