The frozen waterfall rippled down the cliff face in a silver-purple torrent, like Rapunzel hair. It was a mild, pearl-grey day, the temperature well above freezing, and it wasn’t ice that had arrested the flow but calcification.
Decades of steady seepage had veiled the quarried limestone with a thin stalactite curtain. Cold and silky to the touch, its chilly oddness evoked the apocalyptic sci-fi horror film made on Portland in the early 1960s. The Damned stars a young Oliver Reed as a leather-clad gang hoodlum who becomes involved in rescuing a group of strange children imprisoned by the government. Contaminated by nuclear radiation, the children are stone cold to the touch.
Freshwater Bay was one of the film’s main settings, and is named for the spring that emerges on the beach. In the 19th century, the Admiralty built a pumping station on the clifftop to bring drinking water up from the seashore. Convicts from the nearby island prison hewed a dark and creepy tunnel through 30 metres of solid rock.
The tunnel once had an entrance on the beach, faced with ashlar blocks. That fancy masonry is long gone, tumbled into the sea, and the passageway blocked by rock falls.
Much of Portland’s landscape is the result of a long dance between people and nature. South of Freshwater Bay, at Portland Bill, fields are ridged with the long terraces and earth banks of a Saxon farming system that persisted into the 19th century. These narrow strips, known as “lawns”, were used to grow food, typically wheat, potatoes, barley, oats and peas.
Land was split equally among all the children in a family, male or female, creating a relatively egalitarian society where everyone owned something, but no one had very much. By the 18th century, women did most of the agricultural work while the men worked in the quarries, cutting stone to build St Paul’s cathedral and most of Whitehall in London. Individuals were tied into place to an extent that seems incredible today – many Portlanders never visited the mainland, some spending all their lives in one part of the island, not even travelling the three or four miles to its other end.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
