Portland, Home of Stone

August 10, 2016: Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House? Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral? The Palace of Westminster, the Tower of London, the British Museum, even the U.N. Headquarters in New York, all are made of Portland limestone. The stone has been quarried at least since Roman times, from the unusual “tied” island that juts out into the English Channel south of Weymouth, the southern anchor of the equally unusual Chesil Beach.
In the summer months, open-topped bus 501 runs from Weymouth’s King George statue all the way down to the lighthouse at Portland Bill, the southern tip of the Isle of Portland, once an hour. A five GBP ticket gets you a day’s use. There is a more frequent local bus that serves the several communities on the island, but it doesn’t go the whole way. Given that the sun was still shining brightly, and the wind was strong even at ground level, I chose to ride inside. I also chose to get off at the first stop to visit the now-defunct Tout Quarry.

I quickly realized that I was wearing the wrong footwear – boots, not sandals, were needed to cope with the stone chips littering the ground. I also quickly realized that the quarry was not a particularly interesting destination. Plenty of loose chunks of rock, but they soon all looked the same, and the carvings scattered around didn’t hold my interest, either. There were a few good views if you made it up to the rim of the quarry, although here, as around Lyme Regis, the Southwest Coast Path had been rerouted back from crumbling cliff edges.
I walked back to the main road and headed south for the next bus stop, only to encounter a remarkable church. Built in the mid-1700s, it was resolutely Georgian, and it was a little hard to tell from the outside that it was actually a church, as the tower and steeple at the west end looked as if they had been grafted onto an unrelated building. Inside, I found that it boasted two pulpits set across from each other in the center of the nave, with box-style pews at the altar end turned to face the pulpits. Although the church had been Anglican, it had clearly been very low church Anglican. The building had been decommissioned and was now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust. The elderly gentleman seated near the entrance told me that words had been deemed more important than sacraments, and allowed me to go up into one of the pulpits, a new experience for me. It provided a commanding view into all of the pews and the gallery, and I could see that it would be all too easy to develop illusions of grandeur from frequent occupation.

The gentleman recommended the Sugar Loaf in Weston for lunch, and after a good macchiato at Cycleccino, a cafe and bike shop across the street, I enjoyed an excellent crab salad. In fact, it looked so good I took its photograph. After lunch I missed the next bus because traffic kept me from crossing the road in time, and walked on to the island’s museum. As I had suspected, this was not a compelling destination, aside from a few mineral displays, but I did learn three interesting facts. First, the museum had been started by Dr. Marie Stopes, the birth control pioneer, who turned out to have a doctorate in paleobotany and not medicine. Second, a panel told me that the women on the island had enjoyed property rights well before the repeal of the Married Women’s Property Act, which infamously gave husbands total control of their wives’ money and goods, and some had even served as Reeve. Third, less surprising, was a map showing the shipwrecks round the island. Even with the lighthouse I was going to visit – and originally there had been two – this was clearly dangerous territory for ships.

By the time I made it to Portland Bill the day was clouding over. I chose not to go up the lighthouse, and instead watched the waves breaking on the rocks and an occasional fishing boat, and caught the next bus back to Weymouth. While I was glad to have visited the island, it occurred to me that Lulworth Cove might have been a better choice, although there were fewer buses headed there.