Beyond Bill
By ALI RAY
Posted on 23 June 2017
The Isle of Portland in Dorset is full of curiosities. To start with it isn’t quite an island. This four-mile-long bulk of limestone rock that rises 120m high out of the English Channel is attached to Weymouth by the skin of its teeth – a causeway stretches for a mile along a spit of Chesil Beach. The pebbles famously get bigger the closer you get to the island. I know this as I once spent an entire day on a geography field trip at school walking along the beach measuring pebbles. Local lore has it that in the dark, Dorset smugglers used to work out their position on this coastline by the size of the pebbles alone.
Most visitors head straight to the tip of the island – Portland Bill – to visit the lighthouse but by doing so are bypassing a treasure trove of fascinating and curious places to visit, from stone circles, castles, shipwreck sites and wildlife to a disused quarry that has become a form of open air art gallery.
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