Quarrying in Purbeck

Purbeck Stone

Stone that built a nation

Purbeck has been quarried for stone for over two thousand years, and its distinctive limestone has been found in some of the greatest buildings in Britain and beyond, from Roman London to the medieval cathedrals of Salisbury, Canterbury and Westminster Abbey.

The Isle of Purbeck is underlain by a sequence of Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous limestones collectively known as the Purbeck Group. These rocks, deposited in shallow tropical lagoons around 145 million years ago, range from durable building stone and roofing slate to a dark, polished limestone historically called "Purbeck marble" that was in extraordinary demand for decorative work in the great churches of medieval England. The stone outcrops along the southern ridge of the Isle of Purbeck, from Swanage westward to Worth Matravers and beyond.

For the people of Swanage, quarrying was for centuries the primary industry and the principal source of prosperity. The town grew around the stone trade; indeed, almost every historic building in Purbeck is built of local limestone, and the characteristic grey-white stone gives the villages of the Isle their distinctive, timeless appearance.

Roman & medieval heritage

From Roman villas to great cathedrals

Purbeck marble, technically a limestone packed with the tiny shells of a freshwater snail (Viviparus) that takes a fine polish, was prized by the Romans for architectural mouldings, inscriptions and decorative veneers across Roman Britain. It was already being used in the Bronze Age for burial cists, and by the first century AD a thriving stone trade was established on the Isle of Purbeck.

It was in the medieval period, however, that the stone reached its greatest fame. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, Purbeck marble was in extraordinary demand for the interiors of the great Gothic cathedrals being built across England and beyond. Salisbury Cathedral received some 3,000 marble pillars sourced from Dunshay near Corfe Castle, and the same stone features prominently in Canterbury Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Exeter, Durham, York, Wells and Worcester. The Temple Church in London, regarded as one of the finest medieval interiors in England, was lined with Purbeck marble. Most of the stone was moved by sea, shipped from Swanage or from coastal quarry platforms, making this one of England's earliest bulk seaborne trades.

In the reign of King Edward I, written records show that 41 shillings was paid for "the freight of a ship bringing marble from Corfe", and a recent underwater discovery in Studland Bay of a medieval cargo of unpolished Purbeck marble columns confirmed that the stone was being carved locally before shipment, not just in London.

The underground quarrs

Shafts, capstans & the quarr system

The earliest quarries in Purbeck were shallow open-cast workings, simply digging down from the surface. Once the near-surface stone had been removed, the quarrymen began to access the rock using shafts, creating what became known locally as "quarrs". These shafts went down up to 125 feet (approximately 38 metres) and were then worked horizontally, with miners tunnelling outward in low underground galleries to follow the stone seams.

The oldest surviving underground workings date from around 1650. At several quarry sites, stone was brought to the surface using wagons or baskets pulled up the shaft by a horse or donkey walking in circles to turn a large capstan winch. Durlston Country Park has a replica of this type of capstan winch near the lighthouse on one of the disused mine shafts, giving visitors a sense of how the work was done.

Many of these family quarrying operations have remarkable continuity. The firm of H.F. Bonfield and Son has been quarrying Purbeck stone since 1651, a continuous family business of nearly four centuries, and its stone has been used in Hampton Court, Ely Cathedral, St Paul's Cathedral and many other notable buildings. Several other Purbeck quarrying families have records going back to the mid-seventeenth century. The ancient bridleway known as the Priest's Way, running between Swanage and Worth Matravers, passes several abandoned underground quarry entrances whose overgrown spoil heaps and collapsed openings can still be found in the hillsides.

Coastal quarrying & the London trade

Cliffside galleries & the Great Fire

The great expansion of Purbeck stone extraction in the seventeenth century was driven partly by disaster: the Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed much of the city, and the subsequent rebuilding created enormous demand for paving stone. Purbeck limestone, tough and resistant to wear, was ideal. It was loaded directly from ships moored off Swanage beach or lowered from clifftop quarries into waiting vessels using wooden cranes called "whims", a distinctive feature of the coast between Swanage and Kimmeridge.

The coastal quarries between Swanage and Kimmeridge are among the most dramatic evidence of this industry that visitors can see today. Tilly Whim Caves at Durlston, now accessible as part of Durlston Country Park, are the remains of a series of worked caves cut into the limestone cliffs, the galleries where quarrymen worked the stone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the sea below them. Dancing Ledge, cut into the flat wave-cut platform, was worked until the late nineteenth century and is now popular with swimmers and sea swimmers. Winspit, near Worth Matravers, was quarried from the early 1700s until 1953, when the last underground gallery was finally abandoned, one of the last workings of its kind in Purbeck.

Quarrying reached its peak output in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Purbeck stone paved many of the principal streets of London and other cities. The trade began to decline in the twentieth century as cheaper alternatives became available, but a number of open-cast quarries continue to work the stone on the southern ridge of the Isle of Purbeck today.

The living industry

Quarrying today

The stone industry in Purbeck has not ended, it has evolved. Today, all active quarrying uses open-cast methods, with all the working sites located on the southern ridge of the Isle of Purbeck, running east-west between Swanage and beyond Worth Matravers. Many of these quarries remain family-owned, with some firms tracing their quarrying ancestry back to the seventeenth century.

Modern Purbeck stone is used for restoration work in historic buildings (where its precise character is difficult to replicate with other materials), for garden and landscape stonework, for memorial and monumental masonry, for flooring, and for traditional construction in the local area. The Burngate Purbeck Stone Centre near Langton Matravers provides a working demonstration of the stone carving and masonry traditions, with courses and displays open to visitors. The stone industry and its heritage is also a central theme of the Swanage Museum and Heritage Centre in the town.

Purbeck marble itself, the highly polished decorative stone, ceased commercial extraction in the 1990s, though limited quantities have been worked since. Its legacy is visible in virtually every medieval cathedral in southern England, and it continues to be quarried in small amounts for conservation restoration projects.

The Stone

The stone beneath your feet is history itself

Every Purbeck village, every old church, every clifftop path lined with dry-stone walls is built from the same limestone that graced Westminster Abbey and the Temple Church. The quarrying heritage is woven into the very landscape.