In his novels, short stories and poems, the Victorian writer Thomas Hardy created Wessex as a “real-and-imagined place” (Edward in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places, Blackwell, 1996). With his references to the Celtic, Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon as well as Danish and Norman heritages of the region, he created a multifarious past which fostered the existence of hybrid identities. In order to discuss the versatility of Hardy’s imaginary Wessex, this chapter refers to the metaphor of the palimpsest which was introduced by Thomas de Quincey in his Suspiria de Profundis (1845) and which has by now become a basic term in cultural studies (Nebelin et al. in Palimpsest und Raum: Über ein neues Konzept für die Kulturwissenschaften, 2024). Taking up Sarah Dillon’s definition of the term “palimpsestuous,” this paper will show that the novels The Return of the Native (1878) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) represent snapshots of a region which is in constant change. In The Return of the Native, Egdon Heath is described as a scenery which is permanent and evolving. The detailed depiction of the town’s architectural structures in The Mayor of Casterbridge further reveals the palimpsestuous character of Wessex. Consequently, Hardy’s novels serve as a means to satisfy his conservationist zeal, to preserve Wessex as it was at the moment his stories took place. Writing thus becomes a means to immortalise a moment in time. Consequently, not Wessex itself, but Hardy’s writings become sites of memory in Pierre Nora’s sense. At the same time, his writing is characterised by a sense of loss, by a knowledge that some things can hardly be brought back. Like the metaphor of the palimpsest, Wessex is both: an immutable space and a space in transit.