Corfe Castle And Swanage

The Purbeck peninsula is officially protected as an Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Its two most popular man-made attractions are Corfe Castle and the seaside town of Swanage. They were linked by rail from 1885 by a branch line from Wareham which was closed in 1972, but has since been restored privately as a tourism attraction, with steam locomotives.

Corfe Castle
Throughout history, the peninsula was protected from overland invasion by the Purbeck Hills, a ridge way across its neck. (Ridged hills are called downs from the Celtic word dwn which also gives us "sand dune.") This line of downs runs westward from above Swanage and offered a trade route connection to the Great Ridgeway across England to the North Sea. The final down here above Swanage is called Nine Barrow Down because on top of it are nine barrows or burial mounds, where nine 'kings' were popularly thought to be buried with their Bronze Age treasures. Whether the mound on which the castle was built is natural or man-made or a combination of both is not known.

This Down is cut off from the others by a cleft or small pass. The Old English word for this was cort or ceorfan, meaning a cutting. After the Norman Conquest, a castle was built to guard this pass, now known as Corfe Gap, and called Corfe Gate. From here the occupants or defenders could see overland for miles, including eastward down into England’s largest natural harbour, Poole Harbour. After defeating a Danish fleet that occupied the harbour in 877, Alfred the Great had a tower built on the mound that stands in the gap in the Downs. The Saxons called the Harbour below 'Longfleet.' Saxon fleot meant a length of tidal water - at low tide a long winding route was needed to sail safely all the way up the River Frome, to the walled port of Wareham. The Saxons called the peninsula between Poole Harbour and Corfe Stolland - modern Studland, meaning a “stud ranch” or place where stallions and mares were taken for breeding.

In 1646 Cromwell’s engineers spent months tunnelling into the hill, and fires were set in the tunnels. The walls above were blown up with gunpowder. The village below, also called Corfe Castle, was damaged in the three-year siege, and stone from the castle ruins was used in rebuilding it. The village today still has many old inns and buildings of Purbeck Stone. A few buildings even date as far back as the 1640s. The castle proved so well built that much of it was left standing, remaining as the dramatic ruin you see today. In the village is a model of the castle as it was pre-1646.

The old records say that on the cliff-top between these two bays was Studland Castle, where King John had stayed. It fell into the sea as the cliff itself fell away, due to tidal erosion. A fort built by Henry VIII to replace the Castle in 1540 in case of an invasion from France or Spain also fell into the sea.
Henry’s daughter Queen Elizabeth I finally put a stop to the pirate trade during her reign. She also fought off the Spanish in 1588, when the Spanish Armada, sailing eastward along the Channel coast to prepare for an invasion of England, was wrecked by a series of storms all around the coast. There were sea-battles along the coast, and a captured treasure ship from the Armada, called the San Salvador, sank ablaze in Studland Bay. Some Swanage families later claimed dark-haired ancestors were Spanish survivors of the Armada.

Durlston Castle was built by George Burt in the 1880s on the headland just south of Swanage to help promote the town.


It is a mock-Gothic edifice, described by one early travel book as "a stronghold of the Bank Holiday period," and was in fact was built as a public restaurant, with a viewpoint holding a great stone globe.

Because the town is made up from London bits and pieces, the architecture of Swanage appears slightly eccentric. An example of the way the town was built up using this way can be seen at the Sisters of Mercy convent building along the High Street, south side. This was built in 1875 as George Burt’s home, Purbeck House. It re-used such relics of old London as columns from Billingsgate fish market and statues from the Royal Exchange to create a manor house in Scottish Baronial Style. His other residence was cliff-top Durlston Castle manor-house, with its famous giant stone globe. And Alfred the Great’s destruction of the Danish fleet in 878 is commemorated by a seafront column with a pile of cannon-balls from the 1854-6 Crimean War on top!
So many London stonework bits and pieces were re-used in Swanage to “dress up” the town that it became known by the end of the Victorian era as Little London By The Sea. The poet and travel writer Paul Hyland called it "the craziest town I know. It has the sublimity of long history, the charm of a fishing village, the ambition and pragmatism of a port, and the calculated grace of a watering-place." It is regarded as a classic example of the quaint English seaside resort.

Swanage architecture is a mix of the old and the new, of local stone and discards from London. (The clock tower, originally a memorial to Wellington, came from London's Tower Bridge.)