Now, I said I wasn't going to post about my Dorset holiday again, but I'd forgotten that there was one more site which I ought to have added to the post on follies. On my walk from Corfe I wanted to see the 'Monument' marked on the map at Bucknowle House. Bucknowle has a long history: there was a Romano-British villa on the site, one of a series demonstrating that the Isle of Purbeck was perhaps the most heavily-populated part of Dorset at that time. The Monument, however, appears on the modern Ordnance Survey map ...
... but not, as far as I can tell, any others, even fairly detailed maps from a few decades ago. You can see how the site is easy to pinpoint, at the top of a long plot of land which tapers to the north, away from the house called West Bucknowle, just above the contour line marked '47' in the map. But when you get there, this is what you find:
Under this mass of leaves is a concrete platform, and at its rear beneath the bush and to its right are several hefty shaped granite blocks loosely arranged in a semicircle. Nothing like granite is native to Purbeck. The blocks don't seem to have anything carved on them (not that I could see very well). Is this the 'Monument'? It's in the right place, and is an artificial structure of some sort, but isn't much of one. What does it commemorate? Is it really, like the 'ruined cottage' at St Catherine's Hill, a very recent piece of work even though it looks so overgrown - although the tendency of the Ordnance Survey is the other way round, keeping items recorded even when they've long disappeared? I'm really noting it here just so that there is some record of it: there's nothing else about it anywhere online.
You're right, I have a 1985 OS "Outdoor Leisure 15" map of Purbeck, two and a half inches to the mile, and there's no trace of it.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere else on Purbeck is a stone circle which I visited once (back in the 1980s). It is in woodland close to a road, and looks like "the real thing", but someone told me it was a piece of Victorian whimsy. I wish I could remember where.
It's an oddity, isn't it? I could try to write to the house and enquire.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds as though you may have been to Rempstone, which is a genuine neolithic circle exactly in the situation you describe - and not that impressive! But I gather there is also a folly-circle somewhere, too.
Can you contact OS? Google are quite friendly on this sort of thing - I spotted that they had wrongly labelled a church as a cathedral once (and omitted to label the Cathedral up the road at all), and they were very grateful to me for letting them know.
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