Thomas Hardy's Wessex as an artistic conceit, and has spawned a lucrative tourist trade, and even a devolutionist Wessex Regionalist Party. Outer Wessex is sometimes referred to as Nether Wessex. The abbreviations for Thomas Hardy's novels that are used in the table are as follows: Artists such as Walter Tyndale, Edmund Hort New, Charles George Harper and others, have painted or drawn the landscapes, places and buildings described in Hardy's novels. Their work was used to illustrate books exploring the real-life countryside on which the fictional county of Wessex was based: Thomas Hardy's Wessex The English author Thomas Hardy set all of his
Wessex West Somerset Yeomanry adopted a Wessex Wyvern rampant as the centre piece for its cap badge, and the current Royal Wessex Yeomanry adopted a similar device in 2014 when the Regiment moved from wearing individual squadron county yeomanry cap badges to a unified single Regimental cap badge. When Sophie, Countess of Wessex was granted arms, the sinister supporter assigned was a blue wyvern, described by the College of Arms as ""an heraldic beast which has long been associated with Wessex"". In the 1970s William Crampton, the founder of the British Flag Institute, designed a flag for the Wessex region which