An argument is developed concerning the role of landscape in the writings of Thomas Hardy. Two themes are reviewed and developed. One is Hardy’s rural landscape as a place of loss both to time and to industrialisation. The other is landscape as a site of projection of subjective states, including landscape as cruelly indifferent or treacherous. From this emerges the idea of landscape as deceiver, aligned with Hardy’s wider concern with illusion and reality. The overriding importance of visual perception, its multiple subjectivities, and its relation to depiction, is used to draw attention to the previously under-researched importance of Hardy’s practical, working experience of drawing, as trainee architect and throughout his life, in enabling him to add a significant further level to the notion of the deceptive and untrustworthy landscape.