'Purbeck - The Ingrained Island' by Paul Hyland (1989 edn.)

The Isle of Purbeck has a wider variety of wildflowers than any other comparable area of the British Isles. This is because of its complex geology, its bands of different rock running east-west along it, and the alluvial sands and gravels of the heath along its northern, Poole Harbour, side. And of course it’s not an island, even if you count the River Frome and its one-time marsh margins south of Wareham as a water barrier; westwards Purbeck sort of just disappears into Dorset generally and it’s not completely clear when you have left it.

On my last Dorset sojourn back in the Autumn I bought a secondhand copy of Paul Hyland’s Purbeck: the Ingrained Island. Hyland organises his meditative travelogue around those different geological regions, so wildly distinct within this compact area – the Provinces, he calls them, and names each after the tool that characterises human use of that mini-landscape. Soils, natural history, and the business of human exploitation, lay over each other in what is a thoroughly sedimentary approach to landscape-writing, not written chronologically, but each layer packing down to form a palimpsest portrait of a remarkable part of the world. The Ingrained Island was first published in 1978, when some of the old lads who’d worked in Purbeck’s quarries west of Swanage could still be found nursing pints at the Square & Compass in Worth Matravers, coated with limestone-dust, one pictures; early enough for that, and late enough for its author to worry about what the result of oil drilling on the Isle at Kimmeridge and Arne might be. Forty years later those oil fields are almost exhausted and another layer of Purbeck’s past settles into memory. Each facet of the past Hyland calls attention to is not an isolated fact but one detail of a vast and interlocked picture: every location rests on its own history, linked to every other’s, not a separate fact but a note in the grey-green music whose great themes are rock and work. The book concludes with the mock-Saxon cross at Studland, blessed only a couple of years before the text was complete, weaving birds and jet planes with a vine, making the author’s point for him.

It’s quite a brutal narrative, sometimes, one feels when reading the poetry which introduces each section, perhaps deliberately so. But there is not a page you feel you’ve wasted your time reading. Purbeck ‘is like a hand that holds a secret. Finger by finger it opens, disclosing only itself, a scarred and work-worn hand, an ingrained palm to be lovingly grasped, and read’; and here is the secret’s key.