Tourists with a taste for literature are to be allowed to stay in the cottage where Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 - if they can endure its lack of mod cons. The National Trust had planned to turn the cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, into a luxury holiday hideaway, but many local people and Hardy enthusiasts were against updating the thatched cottage. So guests will have to live without electricity, huddling around a wood stove, and fetching water from an outside tap. But on health and safety grounds, candles will be banned and battery-powered lights provided.