Lost monuments of the Isle of Purbeck
The sunny Isle of Purbeck - home to Old Harry Rocks and Purbeck ice cream - may have been a special place in prehistory.
The Isle of Purbeck, a peninsula on the south coast of Britain, has been important throughout our history for a number of reasons. It is the place where Purbeck stone comes from, a sturdy sedimentary rock used to built much of Victorian London. During the Iron Age, it produced ‘coal money’, a kind of shale currency that circulated across the region. It’s also the heart of the Jurassic Coast, where palaeontology began to be reconsidered as a serious discipline through the likes of Mary Anning, as enormous fossils of fish, reptiles and ammonites crumbled out of the eroding cliffs.
While today it has been relegated mostly to a holiday destination, and a good place for go for a Duke of Edinburgh expedition, that should not detract that it has an incredibly rich, and monumental, past, influenced by the rolling landscape and dramatic cliffs that would have drawn people over from far afield.
Prehistoric Purbeck
The oldest of Purbeck’s monuments are Neolithic long barrows, straddled over the Purbeck Ridge that extends from Old Harry Rocks to where the Tyneham military range is now. This would undoubtedly have been an important route-way when the area was completely forested. Not much is known about the relation of Purbeck’s first farmers with those elsewhere, but stray finds of Windmill Hill-style pottery, produced in Wiltshire, hint at a connection with the communities that would later build Stonehenge. 1
It was during the Early Bronze Age that the peninsula saw a monument-building boom. Dozens of round barrows straddle the Purbeck Ridge and surrounding fields, while three megalithic monuments are known: the Harp Stone menhir, north of Kimmeridge Bay, an overgrown stone circle known as Rempstone Circle, and a alignment of six or possibly seven stones known as the Studland Stones stands in the heath. Documentary records tell of other stones in the wider area now lost due to development or agricultural activity, and no doubt more existed within Purbeck itself.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49e9f729-04cb-49c5-814b-3e1b21e96078_600x450.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffe3cb8b0-542f-4811-9abe-70b072408b03_1200x900.jpeg)
Three-dimensional render of one of the stones at Rempstone Circle, using Agisoft Metashape Standard. Credit: the author (and his brother Tom for taking the photos)
Three-dimensional render of the remaining Studland Stone, close to Ferry Road, using PolyCam. Credit: the author
Ritual aspects of these monuments are hinted at by a possible stone-lined causeway just to the east of Rempstone Circle, 2and by the results of past antiquarian excavation. One round barrow situated on Nine Barrow Down was dug into in the late nineteenth century to reveal not only a wealth of copper and bronze ornaments, but one crouched burial with several skulls clustered around it. While, it’s impossible to say whether these were battle trophies or acts of reverence by close family members without further investigation, it in itself is rarely documented for the period, and may indicate something about what the Isle of Purbeck meant or who administered it.
Stranger stones
From fearsome fossils to rapidly eroding outcrops, the peninsula is rich in geological oddities. One of the most spectacular ones is Agglestone Rock, an immense sandstone boulder situated at the top of a small hill within Goslington Heath, west of Studland. Various local legends ascribe its origin to the jealousy of the Devil, who threw the enormous rock from the Isle of Wight aiming to strike Salisbury Cathedral, or in some versions, Bindon Abbey. Historic illustrations show that the rock once had a neatly trapezoidal shape, narrow at the base and wider at the top, and surrounding it were a ring of small sandstone boulders, resting at the summit of an almost conical hill.
While Agglestone Rock (known locally as the Devil’s Anvil for its roughly anvil-like shape and presumably also because of the rich iron content of the sandstone) is an entirely natural outcrop, exposed by millennia of wind action, there is good reason to speculate that the legend has prehistoric origins, perhaps dating as far back as the Bronze Age. For one, Salisbury and Bindon Abbey are both sited adjacent to ancient sites; the Old Sarum enclosure and the Bindon hillfort respectively. The folklorist and poet J.J. Messingham claimed that the stone itself had been a menhir, ‘looked upon with dread’ by the later Celts.
Topographic associations with the Devil are also commonly applied to prehistoric and pre-Christian monuments, such as the Devil’s Dyke, a Bronze Age ditch that extends across northeast Dorset and Hampshire, while another ditch known as Grim’s Dyke - Grim being another name for the Germanic god Wōden, who was often conflated with the Devil in church literature - extending nearby. It could be that the dramatic boulder - sharply cut by the elements - was a natural sanctuary of sorts, perhaps from the time that the Rempstone Circles were raised in the Early Bronze Age.
Another clue to its past lies in the name: Agglestone, probably meaning ‘Eagle Stone’ in Old English. Interestingly the same name is applied to a large iron-rich stone found close to the village of Eggleston in County Durham, where local tradition claims was used in times past to tie eagles to when practicing falconry. From the Agglestone you can see most of the peninsula; an ideal spot for the sport. Eagles, historically, have been symbols of leadership and power, and it is possible that eagles nested on the rock, given its porous surface and because sea-eagles used to thrive on the Jurassic Coast before the nineteenth century. Perhaps even in prehistory, the ‘eagle’s rock’ was a sacred place, jealously protected by local chiefs. The name may have had other connotations as well: to the Old English helig, or holy, or the Old English aethling, or prince, naming it the Holy Stone or the Prince’s Stone respectively.
The Agglestone is not the only unusual stone. Barely exposed above thick brambles and gorse is the Puckstone or Goblin’s Stone, made of same iron-rich material as its larger counterpart. Local folklore also names it the Fairy Stone. Could this too be a folkloric relic from pagan times? Unlikely, but it must have had some significance to Bronze Age people, whose Neolithic ancestors had cleared the land and exposed these dramatic boulders to be seen from miles around.
Fairy Circles
An equally longstanding mystery has been the numerous ‘fairy circles’ which dot the western beach of the Studland peninsula, facing Poole Harbour. Faring in size from four to eleven metres in diameter, these enigmatic circles, consisting of depressions encircled by a bank, are spread across two distinct areas: the coastal Heath between Jerry’s Point and Redhorn Quay, and a short distance south of Brand’s Point, across land mostly owned by Greenlands Farm3.
Various early writers claimed differently: the Reverend John Austen in 1860 described them as ‘hut circles’, constructed by the pre-Roman inhabitants of Dorset. However, since no prehistoric material has ever come out of the circles, and because the sandy soil where they lie on, by most estimates, was deposited as recently as the sixteenth century, it seems safe to assume a post-medieval rather than a prehistoric origin.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F04b02f4e-d2c5-476b-b1be-315b7c3d7e91_490x663.png)
Despite this, though, there are no documentary records as to what they were for: activities known to have been taking place locally such as clay extraction and alum extraction might have left circular remains, but not to this scale or frequency. Their potential use as duck-ponds or animal pens seems a bit far-fetched as well. One interesting idea, mooted by the authors, is that the circles are post-medieval ‘bee gardens’, which are also found in New Forest heathland as rectangular and circular earthworks4.
Keeping lots of bees would have made the heathland incredibly colourful, ideal for Purbeck’s eighteenth century status as a health retreat. Another possibility, if less attractive, is that they were seaweed-drying stores, used in creating rich manure for the local farmers.
These fairy circles may have more secrets to hide. Similar, undated, earthworks are sprawled across north-east Wiltshire, and also across Sopley Common near Christchurch. Radiocarbon dating of pollen from the circles came back with a few Iron Age dates, as well as medieval and post-medieval. It is also notable that some of the circles overlap, hinting at an extended history of use which has somehow escaped the written record.
Much more can be said about the prehistory of Purbeck - such as the prehistory of its trademark building material, Purbeck Stone. Long before being used in London architecture, the stone was being transported from the peninsula by people at the end of the last Ice Age. Excavations at Mother Siller’s Channel, just east of Christchurch, revealed that heavy slabs of the stone had been set into the ground to create a durable hearth floor, where hunter-gatherers worked, ate, lit fires, slept and entertained each other5. Stones set in the hearth were also found to be made of Purbeck Stone.
Why go to this effort, hauling heavy slabs from dozens of miles away, when stone was available locally? The most likely explanation is that Purbeck Stone, unlike local material, is especially resistant to cracking when heated. This shows that these hunter-gatherers were thinking long term, setting a camp that would endure over a season of hunting. Similarly old tools made of Purbeck Stone have also been found on the Isle of Portland6, possibly for that same reason.
Much later in prehistory, another monument was raised with Purbeck Stone - a port on the northern side of Poole Harbour, sometime in the second century BCE. This consisted of two enormous jetties, one some 160m in length and paved with Purbeck stone slabs, and around ten metres in height. The resulting waterfront complex closely resembles ports around the ancient Mediterranean, such as that around pre-Roman Carthage and the Phoenician colony of Motya, near Sicily7.
This was clearly a port designed for vessels larger than longboats; perhaps even seagoing Carthaginian ships. The length of the jetties would have restricted access to the harbour itself: a monopoly for any community that controlled it. Some evidence for its economic power comes from the cluster of Carthaginian coins found in the local area, predating the Roman conquest by centuries89.
All in all, even a postcard destination such as the Isle of Purbeck can hold some tantalizing remains of the past. Much like what has been argued for places such as Land’s End and Gibraltar, the peninsula would have represented a prominent landmark; the first for a sailor crossing the Channel from the coast northern France.
From ancient hearth floors to shale currency, people across the ages recognized this, and made the Isle of Purbeck famous as far as the Mediterranean.
Grinsell, L. V. (2014). The ancient burial-mounds of England. Routledge.
Calkin, J. B. 1960. “Some Archaeological Discoveries in the Isle of Purbeck Part II- A Possible Avenue to the Rempstone Circle.” Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 81: 114–116.
Bellamy, P. S., Broadbent, G., Corney, M., & Wilson, C. (2014). Investigations on the Studland Circles by the Dorset Alum and Copperas Industries Project. In Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society (Vol. 135, pp. 297-310). Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society.
Smith, N. (1999). ‘The Earthwork Remains of Enclosure in the New Forest’ Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club & Archaeological Society 54, 1-56.
Cornwall, I and Susann, P. (1970) The Mesolithic Industries of Mother Siller’s Channel, Christchurch, and the neighbouring areas: excavation report. Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club.
Palmer, S. (1970, December). The Stone Age industries of the Isle of Portland, Dorset, and the utilization of Portland chert as artifact material in southern England. In Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society (Vol. 36, pp. 82-115). Cambridge University Press.
Wilkes, E. M. (2004). Iron age maritime nodes on the English Channel coast (Doctoral dissertation, Bournemouth University).
https://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/04/thanet-tanit-and-the-phoenicians.html for more speculation about this.
M. Markey, E. Wilkes & T. Darvill. (2002) 'Poole Harbour: an Iron Age port', Current Archaeology, 181