Betjeman’s Best British Churches. Richard Surman

      Felix is the clay vales of the west and north-west, with Beaminster, Bridport and Sherborne as their chief towns, all in rich farming country abounding in oaks, a land of rivers and stone manor houses and butter pastures and, in the Blackmore Vale, of hunting people.

      Petraea is the chalk downs and rocky formations of Purbeck and Portland. The chalk comes in from Wiltshire and crosses the county diagonally from north-west to Lyme Regis in the south-west. The hills are higher and steeper than those of Wiltshire, and topped by a marvellous series of earthworks, including Maiden Castle, with its two miles of ramparts, one of the biggest pre-historic earthworks in the world. From the chalk heights you may often see the English Channel on one side and the azure blue of the rich vales inland. The red-brick 18th-century town of Blandford Forum and the white limestone county town of Dorchester are in the chalk. The Isle of Purbeck, with Wareham at its gate and Swanage on its coast and Corfe Castle in the middle, is a hilly diversity of geological formations which makes the crumbling cliffs, with their boulder-strewn shores, strange indeed. Purbeck marble, such as supplied columns for Westminster Abbey, the Temple Church, London, Salisbury Cathedral, and many a medieval font and effigy, may be seen at Durlston Head near Swanage. The loveliest part of the island of Purbeck is cut off by the military. The Isle of Portland, with its own tall, fair-haired people a separate race from the mainland, is a block of limestone nearly four miles long and with hardly any trees. Here was quarried the white stone Wren used for St Paul’s Cathedral and many of his churches. It is quarried today.