Day 219 - August 7th

Today we visited Portland. Our first port of call was Portland Castle.  We've visited before but there's quite a bit to see so worth a return visit.

One of Henry VIII's finest coastal forts, Portland Castle was built in the early 1540s to protect against French and Spanish invasion.

In the kitchen there are displays of food to see how staff would have prepared and cooked food for the troops based at the castle. 

Now open to the sky but once covered with a roof , the gun room still houses five cannons.

From the upper gun platform you can walk along the wall walk and enjoy views out to sea. 

After visiting the castle we took a short wall along Portland Marina, which hosted sailing events during the 2012 Olympic Games

A fairly new addition to the marina was a memorial made of Portland stone for Danny the Dolphin. Danny was a bottlenosed dolphin who captured the hearts of locals. He was regularly sighted in Weymouth Bay and Portland Harbour, and delighted tours of boat trippers by jumping out of the water just feet away from them. But Danny was tragically killed in 2020 after being struck by a ship in Portland Harbour. Following the death £1,000 was raised to create a memorial plaque at Portland Marina.

Later we visited Tout Quarry Sculpture Park and Nature Reserve. Tout Quarry Nature Reserve and Sculpture Park is an abandoned stone quarry which has now been turned into a stone sculpture park where you can discover over 60 hidden sculptures. The maze of paths through the quarry makes finding each of the sculptures like a game of hide-and-seek, and you sometimes need to scramble over boulders and squeeze through mini-valleys to find the pieces spread across the grounds. We have been here before but as its one of my favourite places to visit on Portland I was happy to visit again.

Some of the views from the site are amazing.

This sculpture created by Anthony Gormley is possibly the most famous one in the Quarry Park. It is called Still Falling and refers likely to the history of this planet earth. His other works include the famous Angel of the North at Gateshead.

Also being a Nature Reserve, there are lots of plants growing wild. The blackberries we saw seemed to be far later in their growth than the part of the country we live in,

We ended our day watching the weekly summer firework display on Weymouth seafront