Many photographers travel thousands of miles to capture exotic landscape images, but the Isle of Purbeck is a landscape photographer’s dream and offers dramatic coastal scenery much closer to home. The greatest hardship here will be getting up before dawn for some striking sunrises, or scrambling down steep inclines or across slippery rocks to get close to the shore.
The fifteen-mile stretch of this Dorset coast from Durdle Door to Worth Matravers has some real gems, formed millions of years ago. Some locations are very well-known and visiting them can be very special, just seeing the rugged outcrops of rock and imagining how some of the coves were formed by the relentless power of the sea over millions of years.
Man o’ War Bay is less well-known than its famous neighbour, Durdle Door, but in its own way it is also stunning, with the offshore rock formations causing fascinating patterns in the waves breaking on the beach.
Lulworth Cove is a stunning horseshoe-shaped bay with striking ‘folded rocks’ in the cliffs making up the jaws of the cove. The bay is almost a complete circle and as a result, sunrise or sunset can be witnessed across the water at almost any time of the year.
Stair Hole, immediately adjacent to Lulworth Cove has more folded strata rocks – thrust at almost 90° to their original orientation – generally known as the ‘Lulworth crumple’.
Venturing into the ‘range walks’ through the army firing ranges between Lulworth and Kimmeridge (only accessible at weekends or Christmas, Easter and summer holiday periods) opens up less well-known but still stunning coastal scenery. Kimmeridge is another bay offering great photographic opportunities at dawn, with the sun rising over the Clavell Tower on the eastern side, and also dusk from the eastern cliff, or the rocky ledges at Charnel and Broad Bench. (Charnel and Broad Bench are within the army firing ranges.)
Chapman’s Pool is less well-known than some other Purbeck locations, but offers a sense of times past with crumbling cliffs, boulders on the shore and classic ammonites reminding you that much of this scenery was formed in the Jurassic period, around 200 million years ago. Chapman’s Pool is easy to get to from Worth, although the path back to the car park is very steep!
• Tony Cowburn has been a keen photographer for many years, developing his skills on subjects as diverse as high-resolution lithography for silicon chip manufacturing and wedding photography. He lives in Swanage and now concentrates on landscape photography. He is a Licentiate of the Royal Photographic Society (LRPS) and an active member of the Winchester Photographic Society.
www.tonycowburnphoto.weebly.com