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Swyre HeadWalk Details:
The Walk: |
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The road to Swyre Head from our last marilyn (Nine Barrow Down) offered a view of Corfe Castle that I'd never seen before. From here you could truly appreciate its strategic significance in guarding the one gap through the wall of the Purbeck Hills.
Even on the map Swyre Head looks special - dense contour lines outline a giant backwards comma of a headland heading seawards from an inland escarpment. With a trig point, tumulus and obelisk thrown in it looked a good'un before we'd even arrived. With blue skies and bright autumn sunshine, I couldn't wait to get there! We'd decided to make a circular walk out of it, and our route initially ran from the car park across the back of the headland on a broad track through relatively flat pastoral farmland. After my big build up in the second paragraph this felt something of an anticlimax, but after passing a couple of other walkers we came to the western escarpment of the headland. The ground dropped away beneath us, and sea views opened in front of us all the way to the Isle of Portland, many miles away. Scores of metres below us we could see the B&B near the coast path where we'd spent a particularly tired night. The summit of Swyre Head is right at the pointy tip of the comma. Turning left along the edge of the escarpment we soon passed a trig point (at SY 93375 78555). Just beyond we saw the strangely square tumulus that gives Swyre Head the (somewhat contentious) extra height it needs to become a marilyn. Personally I couldn't give a stuff about the controversy surrounding this "man-made" marilyn - I rather enjoy having features like this on top of the hill.
We returned to the car along the eastern escarpment, nearly getting mown down by the pink-clad cyclists on the way. Seawards I could see the evil slopes of Houns-tout Cliff, the ascent of which on the coast path had hurt me particularly badly. Seeing an obelisk ahead Jim expressed a desire to visit it; I on the other hand was happy to lie in the grass instead and enjoy the sun. He went there and back at a fast jog, which I was glad of for it turned out to be chillier than I expected. He returned (looking rather out of breath) with photos of the obelisk from every conceivable angle, none of which looked much more impressive than the view of it from where I sat. Apparently it was a memorial to a Sir William somebody (the writing was a bit eroded). We returned to the car with grins on our faces. Swyre Head is a wonderful
hill indeed.
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Annoyingly we'd come within half a kilometre of
Swyre Head when walking the Coast Path from Swanage to Kimmeridge. We'd
not known about marilyns at the time, and even if we had I doubt if we'd
have bothered with it - I had been so knackered that evening that I'd
refused to go out for dinner, much less climb hills!
We scrambled up a narrow but well-worn path between
gorse bushes to reach the top of the tumulus (and therefore the summit
of our 20th marilyn). The views were breathtaking - we could see most
of the convoluted coastline we'd walked 3 years previously, from St Aldhelm's
Head in the east to Portland Bill in the west. Unfortunately we could
also hear loud cackling emanating from a group of women who'd taken up
residence on the southern side of the tumulus. We descended past them,
and went right to the southern end of Swyre Head, where the flat top of
the headland narrowed to a slender point. We sat on the bench here enjoying
the view for a while, but when a posse of cyclists dressed in fluorescent
pink T-shirts arrived the noise level grew too great for this beautiful
spot, and we felt the need to leave.