Follow the coast path east. A memorial Walk on through the quarry and consider two Emmetts Hill is crowned by Portland Stone and Walk guide written by Paul Hyland sculpture to the Telecommunications options: first, hefting hewn stone up to the brow undermined by the weathering of soft shale. Photography by Paul Hyland, Angie Green and A short to Research Establishment (TRE), unveiled in of the headland and carting it away; second, Views of Chapman’s Pool, its arc of Kimmeridge Delphine Jones. Design by Artcore Studio Ltd. walk 2001 by Sir Bernard Lovell, stands above the tipping it over the edge so that blocks can be Shale, grow better and bleaker. Profiles of © Artsreach 2009 floor of an old quarry. worked down below and manhandled onto boats. Hounstout and Swyre Head, Povington and Yes, you’ve guessed it, the Whiteway Hills, Gad Cliff and Worbarrow Tout St.Aldhelms TRE was masons’ accomplices were crowd up and recede at once. Further information: established in gravity and water. Resisting Marjorie Wallace, Robert Watton, Judith May 1940 when both, there’s a found Malins St. Aldhelms Chapel at St. Aldhelms Head Head scientists, sculpture, a body of Pond The Parishes of the Purbeck Hills 1985- including Freestone with a head and 2005 (church guide) Lovell, moved beak of Spangle. It was not built; someone chose to leave Ilay Cooper Purbeck Revealed here to James Pembroke Publishing 2004 research radar. it in place, while the The first target quarried stone was Paul Hyland Purbeck: The Ingrained Island building imaged on a screen was St dismantled around it. Gollancz 1978, Dovecote Press 1989 Aldhelm’s Chapel. Reg Batt pedalled Return to the Coastwatch station and follow around with sheet aluminium wired to Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site: the coast path to the west, passing close to the www.jurassiccoast.com his bicycle frame to test radar’s flag pole. There’s a quote from Dylan Thomas sensitivity to slow-moving objects. TRE Keep the drystone wall on your right. After the on the last stone seat before the steps: ‘Time Royal Marines memorial garden, six inscribed operated here for just twenty-two months Passes. Listen. Time Passes.’ but was, as the memorial plaque states, stones set into the wall celebrate the wall itself Please let us know if you have enjoyed this St. Aldhelm’s Chapel ‘crucial to the winning of the war and the The return walk to Renscombe is pure delight, and the forces which sustain and erode it. walk by emailing [email protected]. birth of modern telecommunications.’ but it must be earned, with a steep climb down Soon you come to the field path, way-marked steps to Pier Bottom and a corresponding ascent ‘Renscombe’, that leads to the car park. www.artsreach.co.uk Purbeck Footprints As the coast path heads towards the sea a to Emmetts Hill. Pier Bottom is a truncated dry 01305 269512 path doubles back to the right taking you valley. In evening light you can pick out Celtic The whole headland of St Aldhelm – its fabric of down into the quarry. Steps, remains of Fields. A track, running along a terrace above the freestone and shale, its mantle of turf and barley buildings and the footings of masts are almost all valley bottom, was metalled to take stone carts with a few relics to jog our memory – tells us A walk of about 3 miles with that is left of the huge wartime operation which from the quarries to a pier built before 1750, but how, if we stand on the edge of things and listen, one steep section, down and occupied the headland. not shown on any map, to handle 100,000 tons of history, war, work, weather, tides and, yes, time up steps on the coast path. stone for the construction of Ramsgate harbour. itself will simply pass. marks. Celtic fields occupy over sixty acres. Purbeck Footprints Tatters of strip fields are superimposed on them. This dank place may have been a chantry Barrows yielded finds and burials. To the right, a chapel in which to sing masses for souls dry valley, Pier Bottom, runs down into the lost at sea. Like Corfe Castle, it is built Portland Sands. Pottery, shale lathe-cores and mainly of Burr, quarried three miles away, A short walk to Underground Roman coins were dug up east of St Aldhelm’s though there are chunks of Ham stone quarry entrance St. Aldhelm’s Head Quarry. In 1982 ploughing unearthed a too, from Ilminster. Unlike a church, its cylindrical grain store twelve feet deep and corners, not its walls, are roughly aligned There is a car park with toilets in Worth Matravers and archaeologists excavated a settlement site. to the points of the compass. a wonderful pub, The Square and Compass. But to begin this short walk you should drive past the pond and the church. Follow the road, left and then right, to Weston Farm. Bear right and left for Renscombe, then left again To the south the Coastguard Cottages and St As you for the car park on the right-hand side of the rough road Aldhelm’s Chapel stand on the skyline. approach, see where the chapel is situated: on a to St Aldhelm’s Head (OS map reference: SY964775). MAP two-foot high platform in a circular earthwork described as ‘an early Christian enclosure.’ ‘St Aldhelm’s Head,’ writes venerable Hutchins, ‘now vulgarly called St St Aldhelm’s Chapel was built in the late Alban’s Head,’ is still so called by those twelfth century, dedicated to Dorset’s who should know better. Even Ordnance St Aldhelm’s Quarry is marked as a ‘Stone first Saxon bishop. A hermit may have Survey gives the option, ‘St Aldhelm’s or Pitt’ on an early eighteenth-century map. prayed here; footings of a possible cell St Alban’s Head.’ Alban had no links It has been worked by W.J. Haysom & Son It is a wishing place. Seventeenth-century and a young woman’s remains were with Dorset. Aldhelm, scholar, poet, since 1934. It’s still in business, names, from the period when it grew discovered close by. abbot of Malmesbury and later bishop unbuilding shelves of Shrimp, Spangle and ruinous, cover the central pillar. Girls of Sherborne, was the human face of Pond Freestone for prestigious new dropped pins into a cavity there, good luck advancing Saxon culture as Celtic buildings and restoration jobs in churches Like St Mary’s in Corfe Castle, the charms in hope of a man. How many of them Dorset was annexed. and cathedrals. The whine of machinery is chapel was served by a royal chaplain in knew that St Aldhelm’s principal treatise was punctuated by the chime of mallet on Henry III’s time. Was it an outpost of De laude virginitatis, ‘In Praise of Virginity’? chisel. A long-limbed derrick, or jib-crane, the castle? It was a seamark; evidence Continue up the road on foot, keeping to the stands among stacks of stone, last survivor from recent repairs makes the tradition high track. You are making for Purbeck’s prow Beyond the chapel the old Coastguard Station, of a type introduced to Purbeck from that a beacon burned at the point of the across a fertile plain, or plateau above the sea, on now manned by National Coastwatch volunteers, Portland after the First World War. roof more plausible. which Bronze Age and medieval people left their might be the bridge of a ship.