Sticky end? The British pudding faces extinction, English Heritage warns

Not just boiled or steamed desserts in danger, charity finds, households also rarely make fruit pies and crumbles

At the end of the 17th century a French travel writer who crossed the Channel was clearly impressed by the sweet, comforting treats offered to him, declaring with relish: “Ah! What an excellent thing is an English pudding!”

More than three centuries on, English Heritage has sounded the alarm that the good old British pudding is facing extinction.

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Dorset ‘Stonehenge’ discovered under Thomas Hardy’s home

Enclosure older than Salisbury monument found under late novelist’s garden is given heritage protection

When the author Thomas Hardy was writing Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891, he chose to set the novel’s dramatic conclusion at Stonehenge, where Tess sleeps on one of the stones the night before she is arrested for murder.

What the author did not know, as he wrote in the study of his home, Max Gate in Dorchester, was that he was sitting right in the heart of a large henge-like enclosure that was even older than the famous monument on Salisbury Plain.

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