Purbeck Underground

Abstract

The cliff-quarries at Winspit can be reached by following a track that leads down to the coast from the village of Worth Matravers. Here the quarrying of Purbeck-Portland “freestone” that began in 1719 and finally came to an end in 1953 has left a broad platform that drops precipitously into the sea and several galleries leading back into the cliffs,¹ a spectacular amphitheatre that garnered mild notoriety as the setting for illegal raves in the late 2000s. The raves were soon curtailed by the police, and the quarries later became the setting, in 2010, for a site-specific performance of music and projected puppetry as part of the Inside Out Dorset festival. This trajectory, from unofficial hedonists’ playground to a carefully managed backdrop for international artistic spectacle, might seem typical of the way many post-industrial spaces have been repurposed, but the appropriation of this kind of quarry landscape has form. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of directors used both the Portland quarries and Purbeck sea cliff-quarries as filming locations,² employing them as picturesque backgrounds to scenes of separation from the rest of the world, sealed microcosms for the enactment of fantasies of holiness, horror and magic.