Cliffs and Quarries

The sheer cliffs of the south Purbeck coast offer spectacular coastal walking.  Formed of Portland Stone and Purbeck Limestone, the rocks can be seen in the old cliff quarry workings of Seacombe, Winspit and Dancing Ledge.  The coastal limestone downland supports internationally important plants and animals, and the cliffs are home to colonies of breeding seabirds.

Quarrying in Purbeck

The Purbeck Limestones have been quarried since Roman times.  The qualities of the stone vary from layer to layer, making it suitable for a range of uses, from ornamental columns to hard-wearing paving stones.

Mammals

The Purbeck Beds produce a remarkable internationally important record of mammal evolution at the beginning of Cretaceous times.  The mammal fossils are very small, and large amounts of rock need to be sieved in the laboratory to find them.  The beds also contain fossils of reptiles and amphibians, and in total over 100 different vertebrate species have been identified.

The Purbeck mammals lived at the fringes of lagoons and lakes in waterlogged marshland, 140 million years ago.  Most were only the size of a shrew or rat.  The diverse fossil record of the Purbeck Beds is important to science, because it provides a picture of how the animals lived together.

Dinosaur Track

The Purbeck Limestones are famous for their dinosaur trackways - mostly of the dinosaurs Megalosaurus and Iguanodon.  In 1986 a trackway was found in Keat's Quarry with footprints over a metre in diameter - probably made by a large plant-eating dinosaur, such as Diplodocus.

Beckles' Pit

The most significant collection of fossil mammals from Purbeck was made by Samuel Beckles in 1857 in the area around Durlston Bay.  After William Brodie had found a mammal jaw on the shore in Durlston Bay, Beckles was given the task of excavating the rocks from which it came by the eminent scientist, Sir Richard Owen.  The illustrated London News records the scale of the operation: over a nine month period Beckles and his many workmen laid bare an area of over 600 square metres, after removing 16 metres of overlying rock.  It is one of the largest cuttings ever made for scientific purposes.  Beckles' collection is now held by the Natural History Museum in London.