The above image is copyright Dorset County Council 2000 and is reproduced here with permission

This area contains largely unspoiled countryside with not a quarry in sight!

The main road to Portland Bill runs through fields where is are still signs of the medieval 'lawnsheds' - a system of strip farming which is also found in the Purbecks around Langton Matravers.

The most distinctive feature here is Portland's only free running stream which rises in the bramble patch on the upper right-hand edge of the red square and runs in a narrow channel to the cliff edge where it launches itself to the sea far below.

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The spring at Culverwell would have provided fresh water for the Mesolithic folk living nearby. See Susann Palmer's excellent book "Ancient Portland" self-published in 1998 for more details of this site. 

The stream runs 300 metres east across fields and through a deepening gully. This is crossed by a footbridge and then tips over the cliff edge to form Portland's only running stream and waterfall. 

The above picture was taken in 1990.

The picture at right was taken in May 2003 - what a contrast!

The well will be invisible soon.

The stream from Culverwell runs through this channel eroded into the limestone, under the footbridge and out over the cliff edge to form Portland's waterfall, see below.

The Great Portland Waterfall!

Illustrated here (although it belongs in map area 685690) because it marks the end of Portland's only surviving open stream.

My good friend Sandra overcomes her vertigo to stand on the cliff edge.

Watery Lane, near one of the old windmills, had a running stream until recently but even that is now culverted. 

Isolated in a field almost opposite the Lower Lighthouse is what appears from a distance to be a large clump of brambles. This can be seen as the dark spot in the lower left-hand corner of the red square in the aerial photograph above.

However, this consisted of an old carved animal trough made of Portland stone and a broken slab of stone which appears to be covering a well.

Carved on the side of the trough is the date 1865.

This derelict building now only exists as a single layer of blocks with trees growing inside and out. Presumably an old farm building. 

It is located alongside the footpath that runs from the main road opposite the Lower lighthouse at SY68156925.

And here is the view in May 2003 some 15 years after the previous picture was taken.

The remains of this building appear to be no more than a heavily overgrown area of brambles and bushes.

This picture shows the 'lawnsheds' or 'lynchets' that run in parallel lines across the fields between Southwell and Portland Bill. In Victorian times and earlier over 2,000 of these strips were to be found all over Tophill but most have now been built upon.

They represent the remains of a Saxon strip farming system once common throughout Dorset. 

However, because inheritance laws on Portland favoured sons and daughters equally, the farmland became increasingly sub-divided and dispersed such that some people ended up owning hundreds of plots each no more than a few square yards in area.

The view towards Portland Bill from near Culverwell showing that Portland is not all barren quarries and cliffs.

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