Durlston Castle and Anvil Point Lighthouse on Jurassic Coast of UK

John Mowlem (1788-1868), a Swanage-born man, was a stonemason and builder. He was the founder of the quarrying and construction company Mowlem. He and his nephew and business partner George Burt (1816-1894) wanted to give something back to their home town (Swanage, UK), which was the source of their Portland and Purbeck limestone, popular for building at the time. John Mowlem built the Mowlem Institute, a reading room and public library, in 1862. George Burt purchased an undulating tract of land covering Durlston Head during the same year. This estate, the Durlston Estate, included quarries that supplied their firm with limestone. Burt developed this estate as a tourist attraction. Burt established the Durlston Estate upon the crest of the hill and here he built his folly Durlston Castle. The castle was designed by the Weymouth architect G.R. Crickmay (1830-1907) and built by W.M. Hardy in 1886-87 entirely of local stone. The 'castle' was never a real castle: it was purpose-built by Burt as a restaurant for the visitors to his estate. The castle played a part in the evolution of radio and telecommunications. A team of Marconi's engineers used the roof of the castle in the 1890s for some of their early wireless experiments to transmit to the Isle of Wight. The side wall of the castle features a sundial and two stone tablets inscribed with various statistics such as clock times and tides around the world. South of the castle is the Great Globe, built by Burt in 1887.[3] The footpaths around the Castle and Great Globe are lined with cast iron bollards that were brought from London. All around the estate there are further stone plaques carved with quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible, maps showing the English Channel and the United Kingdom, and further facts about the natural world. These surrounds were placed during the period 1887 to 1891. Also within the Durlston Country Park and within walking distance of the Globe are Durlston Bay, the Tilly Whim Caves and the Anvil Point Lighthouse. The Park is part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. The lighthouse is built of local stone and was completed in 1881.[3] It was opened by Neville Chamberlain's father, then Minister of Transport. The lighthouse tower is twelve metres tall, the height of the light above the high-water mark is 45 m (148 ft). The light is positioned to give a waypoint for vessels passing along the English Channel coast. Originally the light was illuminated by a paraffin vapour burner (PVB) set within a large (first order) revolving 14-panel dioptric optic by Chance Brothers & Co.[4] It was the first example of a significant new design of lighthouse optic, whereby (through the use of dense flint glass in the upper and lower portions) the height of a Fresnel lens could be significantly increased, dispensing with the need for additional reflective prisms above and below.[5] During 1960, the lighthouse was modernised and electrified (with a new lamp, powered by mains electricity, replacing the PVB). At the same time a smaller optic replaced the original lens array, which was removed and donated to the Science Museum.[6] Anvil Point Lighthouse was fully automated on 31 May 1991 and is now monitored and controlled from the Trinity House Operations Control Centre at Harwich. The lighthouse had a 1,000 watt filament lamp with an intensity of 500,000 Candela. The lights range was about 19 nautical miles (35 km; 22 mi), but was reduced to 9 nautical miles (17 km; 10 mi) following a review of aids to navigation in 2010. In 2012, a LED lamp was installed above the rotating Fresnel lens to serve as the main light at Anvil Point; its character is, as it was previously, a white flash every 10 seconds (The old lens, though no longer in use, remains in place in the tower.) The old fog signal was a 5-minute cannon. In 1960 this was replaced by an electric emitter. In 1981 new automatic equipment was installed, but the fog signal was discontinued in 1988. Music: Snowfall by Scott Buckley | https://soundcloud.com/scottbuckley Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/