Portland : lighthouses

I’d always wanted to stay in a lighthouse so, three years ago, when I got the chance to join a Glamorgan Bird Club weekend in Portland, I jumped at the chance – and I’ve just been back for my third such weekend. Of course, the purpose of the weekend is birding but Portland Bird Observatory and Field Centre is a former lighthouse, now filled with bunk rooms to accommodate the visiting birders who come to check out the rarities this extreme location always seems to attract.

There are, in fact, three lighthouses at Portland Bill, the narrow promontory at the southern end of the Isle of Portland: the Old Lower Light (now Portland Birds Obs), the Old Higher Light (now converted to holiday accommodation; not covered in this blog), and the current operational light.

When you’re at the Bill, especially in stormy weather, it’s easy to see why the lights are necessary – as the Trinity House website explains

The Portland Race is caused by the meeting of the tides between the Bill and the Shambles sandbank about 3 miles SE. Strong currents break the sea so fiercely that from the shore a continuous disturbance can be seen.

The Old Lower Lighthouse, the attached cottage and its boundary wall are all Grade-II listed structures. The current building, built in 1869, is, in fact, the third lighthouse to be built on this site: the first began operating in conjunction with the Old Higher Light in 1716 but was replaced in 1789. The 1869 structure, the existing Old Lower Light, was built, appropriately enough, of Portland stone and is 63 feet high.

Both the Old Lower and Old Higher Lights were decommissioned in 1906 when Trinity House had the current lighthouse built. The Old Lower Lighthouse has had many incarnations since then: for a time in the early 1900s it was a tea garden, and it has also been a family home. By the 1950s it had been abandoned and was derelict but, thanks to the beneficence of Miss Mary Brotherton, the building was saved, restored and converted for use by visiting ornithologists. And so the Portland Bird Observatory and Field Centre was born, in March 1961, and I’m delighted to report it is still going strong, as a registered charity supported by the passion, hard work and generosity of its warden, staff, volunteers and supporters.

The present lighthouse, the red-and-white-striped tower that stands close to the end of Portland Bill, is 135 feet high. According to Wikipedia, Trinity House   

acquired the required land in 1903. The builders, Wakeham Bros. of Plymouth, began work on the foundations in October 1903. Chance & Co of Birmingham supplied and fitted the lantern ... The lighthouse was completed in 1905 at a cost of £13,000, and the lamp first lit on 11 January 1906 ...
On 18 March 1996, Portland Bill Lighthouse was demanned, and all monitoring and control transferred to the Trinity House Operations & Planning Centre in Harwich [in Essex].

Though I haven’t been in, there is a visitor centre in the former keepers’ cottages at the present lighthouse. As well as perusing the various informative displays about the lighthouse, visitors can also climb the tower to enjoy the views from the top. It’s on my list for my next visit to Portland!

East Sussex : St Margaret’s, Rottingdean

During a recent visit to Rottingdean to see the windmill, my friend Jill and I also had a brief wander around the historic centre of this pretty little town. 

Jill was particularly keen to see the church after we were told by a local in a coffee shop about its Burne-Jones stained-glass windows.

Dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch, this Grade-II listed, Church of England building dates, in part, from the 13th century but has had many subsequent alterations and restorations. 

It is built of flint, with stone dressings and a tiled roof. 

Perhaps to ensure parishioners are never late for services, it has a big bold clock in the wall above the entrance door.

According to the British Listed Buildings website, all but two of the window designs are by renowned pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones, though there is a proviso that the situation may have changed since the original listing, and it did appear that a couple of windows were more modern.

The three windows that immediately catch your eye as you enter St Margaret's Church, those above the altar, are Burne-Jones masterpieces. Designed by him and made by his good friend William Morris, the windows depict the three archangels: from left, Gabriel, the messenger; Michael, the warrior; and Raphael, guardian of children.

These are two more of the stunning windows, which I think were designed by Burne-Jones though, unfortunately, I neglected to take down the details during my visit, and I don’t find the church’s online guide particularly helpful or thorough in its descriptions of the windows.

Following his death in 1898 the ashes of Edward Burne-Jones were buried in the churchyard and memorial plaques to him, and his wife Georgiana, are attached to the exterior of the church, to the south of the main entrance. Burne-Jones lived in North End House, which is just across the village green from the church.

I was intrigued by this rather odd structure, also near the church entrance. The quote, ‘The bird is dead / That we have made so much on’, is from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, act 4 scene 2, where Arviragus enters bearing the seemingly dead Imogen. The memorial, for such it is, is explained in one of the church’s online guidebooks:

Angela Thirkel, society novelist, much loved grand-daughter of Sir Edward Burne-Jones has her memorial also to the left of the West door, a wooden structure needing repair you may think, but this was Angela’s wish that it should ‘rot’ into the ground. The Angela Thirkel Society is still very popular with members who visit St Margaret’s church frequently in her memory. One of her most popular books (repeatedly reprinted) is ‘Three Houses’ a child’s memoir of Rottingdean.

I’m sure there are many other interesting sights to see, gravestones to admire, inscriptions to read in St Margaret’s lovely churchyard but we were on a mission ... that windmill!

East Sussex : Harebeating Mill

This is really the story of a mill that isn’t. Like many former windmills these days, Harebeating Mill, in Hailsham, is no longer a functioning mill; in fact, it’s not even a mill but a private house, with only the round brick base still remaining. The wooden upper storeys, while echoing in their style the original lines of the mill, are a thoroughly modern addition.

And even that brick roundhouse is not in its original location. The publication Hailsham in old picture postcards (M. Alder, European Library, Netherlands, 1984) includes an old photo of the windmill with the following caption:

This post mill, known as Kenwards or Upper Mill, was in a field at the rear of the Methodist Church. In August 1869 it was bought by Robert Thomas Martin and four months later the miller, John Grove Kenward, became enmeshed in the machinery and was killed. Mr. Martin was extremely distressed by the accident and he more or less gave away the windmill on the understanding it was taken down and removed. So it passed into the ownership of George Weller who dismantled and re-erected it on top of a two-storey roundhouse at Harebeating Lane, renaming it Harebeating Mill. The four shuttered sweeps had a span of over seventy feet. The sweeps were removed in 1918 and in 1934 the smock tower collapsed. The brick roundhouse, however, still survives.

Copyright prevents me from including any old images here but, for the curious amongst you, there are several online on the Mills Archive website. There’s a particularly good image taken around 1918 here, and a photo here from the 1940s-50s, by which time the mill was in a very dilapidated state.  

As you might expect, when I recently walked down Harebeating Lane to see this former mill, I also wondered about the name ‘Harebeating’. The residents obviously believe it relates to the mammal and have taken it to heart: one of the farms is named after it, there were sculptures of hares sitting on cottage windowsills, and two of the houses sported images of hares on weathervanes on their rooftops.

Online research wasn’t producing any answers so I asked on Twitter if anyone knew the origin of ‘harebeating’. One local birder tagged a few other birders in the local area and they all wondered, as I had, if the term referred in some way to hare coursing, the now-illegal blood sport where dogs were used to hunt down hares.

Fortunately, one of the birders also referred me to Richard Goldsmith, of the Hailsham Historical & Natural History Society, and Richard has been extremely helpful. Even more fortunately, Richard doesn’t believe the name harebeating has anything to do with hare coursing or, indeed, anything to do with hares. He was able to tell me that ‘The map of 1812 drawn to record the “Wastelands of Michelham Park Gate” shows its name as “Herring Green”’, though he warns that may have been the map maker’s interpretation of what he was told in very broad Sussex!

Richard went on to provide me with this explanation of the name from Judith Glover’s book Sussex Place Names (Countryside Books, Newbury, 1997):

Sussex has some unusual looking names, and Harebeating is surely one of the more curious. Its history is a little odd too, because it actually began as the name of a place some ten miles away at Piddinghoe, recorded during the sixteenth century as Harpetinge – alias “Harpingdene at Piddinghoo”. The place is now lost, but it was originally the tribal territory of a Saxon group called the Herebeorhtingas – Herebeorht’s people. The Domesday book lists it in 1086 as Herbertinges, and in 1211 it’s Herebertingas. By the time it became extinct, the name had become Harpingden, and the original tribal Harebeating form already transferred to what had been part of its manor lands since the Norman Conquest.

As Richard said in his email, this ‘is probably the nearest we are going to get to the original meaning of the name Harebeating.’ My sincere thanks to Richard for his assistance in trying to discover the source of this fascinating name, and to the local tweeters who offered suggestions and pointed me in Richard’s direction.