Dorset in the Autumn 3: Follies and Folklore

The built environment of Swanage owes a lot to George Burt, Victorian builder and partner to John Mowlem whose company survived until being bought by Carillion in 2006. Burt was in a good position to salvage bits and pieces from demolished buildings in London and cart them back to his native town. Chief and roguest, perhaps, among these, was the 17^th-century frontage of the Mercers’ Hall which, in the mid-1880s, became Swanage’s new Town Hall: ‘wildly undisciplined’, Pevsner calls it, and is not far wrong. Burt was also responsible for The Arcade, originally intended as a whole row of premises but which is now possibly the most pretentious pizza-house anywhere outside Italy. Burt’s own home, the incredible castellated Purbeck House, sheltered a variety of rescued architectural bits and pieces including dramatic gateways and a rock arch. Finally, down the coast at Durlston, Burt built a little castle adorned with an open-air palaeontology lesson carved in stone. Here you find the famous Stone Globe, and also a limestone map of East Dorset, too, showing the distance of various places from Durlston.

Follies are not really folkloric though often stories can arise about them. My Dorset travels brought me face to face with two folkloric artefacts, one which I expected to see, and the other a surprise. The first was the sheela-na-gig keeping its place for close on nine centuries among the riotous corbels carved around the monumental church at Studland – a figure so weird and stylised she scarcely looks human. Had PJ Harvey known about this Dorset sheela she wouldn’t have had to drive to Kilpeck in 1990 to look at the more famous one there.

Of course I’ve been to Knowlton Rings many times, but somehow had never noticed that the two yew trees on the edge of the henge have become wishing or memorial trees, tied with ribbons, decorated with painted stones, knitted flowers, bells, and even children’s ties. All of these have stories of their own, and on my visit were telling them to the gale blowing around the Rings. There were definitely no ribbons or relics present when we first came to Knowlton: the earliest reference I can find to this use of the trees is from 2013.