My Favourite Place: Isle of Portland, Dorset
I love being by the sea. My grandparents lived in Conwy, on the north coast of Wales, and when I was a child my granny taught me how to forage and identify the wildflowers on the mountains and cliffs there. My grandpa had a small boat, and we’d go out into the Conwy estuary, so coastal botany has good memories for me.
I like gardens and gardening very much, but wild is where
my soul is. I send the children to the beach while I stand on the vertiginous Dorset cliffs, looking straight out to the sea. Portland is a tied island which is joined to the mainland by Chesil Beach. There are huge ammonites and the rugged rock formations which are fascinating!
Walking over the cliffs is great for plant spotting. They nestle in the cracks out of the of the
wind. I always like carline thistles, their burnished colour reminds me of pirate treasure, and the small scabious Scabiosa columbaria is very good for butterflies, especially the chalkhill blues. There are also lots of six-spot burnet moths, which are really striking.
There’s lots of interesting botany in the old quarries, which used to be the major local industry. I like the way that plants grow in the cracks and you see wayfaring trees that aren’t more than a few centimetres high. There are succulents like rock samphire and I think I saw Portland sea lavender, Limonium recurvum portlandicum, which is really rare. It was quite high up so I couldn’t see it very well, but it seems likely!
Peregrine falcons nest on the
cliffs near where we stay. They’re amazing birds and definitely worth a whole year’s waiting! Its also a good place to watch buzzards, and once we saw an osprey.
Looking at the horizon makes
me feel I’ve come home. I love what that pure continuous line does to the way I feel inside and to my soul. We last went in August and there was a huge full moon. It shone down in a big, red pathway over the water; it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.