Is this Britain's most beautiful coastal resort?

Keith Miller 29 February 2020 • 9:00am

Swanage is a pretty coastal town at the eastern end of the Isle of Purbeck Credit: getty

December can be a busy time of year, so many of you may well have missed the news that the prestigious 2019 National Railway Heritage Award for Signalling went neither to the Leviathan of the East Coast Main Line, nor the Behemoth of the GWR, but to Swanage Railway, a tiny volunteer-run operation in Dorset.

Over the past decade the boys and girls of the railway have laid four miles of track, restored many more, built one signal box, reconfigured another and devised a way for their Edwardian tech to talk to the Network Rail signalling centre in the beating metropolitan heart of Basingstoke. In 2017, they ran a train along the completed line. For the first time since Beeching wielded his axe (well, the first time since 2002 when a Virgin Train trundled – slowly, let’s hope – along a temporary test track) this small, quaint beach resort on the Isle of Purbeck was plugged into the mains.

The diesel engine the railway intends to run to and from the main line at Wareham was last seen in Eastleigh, being brought up to spec. The process has been subject to delays – so at least we know this is a proper railway service. But the award seems to have given the team a bit of a fillip. A plaque is promised imminently.

Will this be the jump-start Swanage needs? Will an opera be commissioned to celebrate this thrilling event, along the lines of Nigel Osborne and Craig Raine’s The Electrification of the Soviet Union, or a doleful dead-end dirge in the vein of Steve Reich’s “Different Trains”? Will a hundred flowers of gentrification bloom, or will there be an epidemic of debauchery and lawlessness, as there was when hordes of Forty-Niners, whacked out on the promise of gold, descended on San Francisco? There was only one way to find out.

I made the journey from Wareham by taxi. There is an excellent hourly bus, the enigmatically named Purbeck Spritzer, but time was short and I was booked to do a Daytripper rather than a Minibreaker, Fortnighter or Dear Lord, Please Don’t Let Me Die Here-er, so Jurassic Cars it was. I hereby apologise unreservedly to the Weekend Lifestyle Expenses Tsar.

Corfe Castle station — The stupidly pretty village of Corfe Castle Credit: getty

The journey bypasses Wareham proper, a handsome walled townlet that’s almost Daytrippable in its own right, then takes you through the stupidly pretty village of Corfe Castle, where sheep graze the castle mound and everything (the houses, the bus shelters, the telephone boxes, even possibly – I didn’t check – the sheep) is made of limestone.

In the course of nine miles you pass through all that is lovely about the English landscape, unless you like mountains: marshy meadow, deep dark woods, rolling fields, tough, scrubby coastal downland and finally the rugged cliffs of the Jurassic Coast.

Swanage itself is, perhaps, not at its very best off season – “You’re the only person we’ve seen all day,” the guys in the pier office told me – though an off-season beach resort has a melancholy beauty of its own, as any novelist will tell you. It’s a riot of retro signage and vanished franchises (there’s even a Wimpy!), along with, yes, more limestone.

I was reminded, to an almost tearful extent, of the Isle of Wight, where I went a lot as a child. The beach is wonderful, wide and sandy, framed to the north by Studland Point, barbed at the tip by Old Harry Rocks (these are part of a vanished chalk seam that once ran to the Needles at the Isle of Wight's western tip, so maybe there’s something material behind my sense of kinship).

I had a lovely, slightly dreamy afternoon in Swanage: I bought some local sheep’s cheese and a bag of challengingly crunchy Dorset Knob biscuits, checked out the Mill Pond, Wellington Tower, Prince Albert Gardens with their Greek-style theatre (complete with neoclassical electricity substation) and the Civic Trust Award-winning sewage works, then stood at Peveril Point, the bay’s southern tip, feeling windswept for a bit. I can’t wait to go back.

The railway

Fans of sans-serif Keep Calm And Carry On-style typography need look no further. The railway is clearly a labour of love; Swanage station, when it’s staffed, is part museum of vintage rolling stock, part-café, part shop. Trains run to and from Norden, just past Corfe Castle, at weekends.

The beach

Swanage has an archetypal English sandy beach, sheltered from the prevailing wind. For a slightly more rugged experience head north to the National Trust-owned Studland Bay, inhabited by both naturalists and, in warmer weather, naturists.

The pub

Swanage boasts two on-brand boozers, The Black Swan and The White Swan. But if you have your walking boots with you, The Scott Arms in Kingston has a spectacular, Game of Thrones-y view of Corfe Castle; or the Square & Compasses in Worth Matravers is a classic country inn.

The shop/restaurant

The Salt Pig Too is the sister of a Wareham shop, selling, and serving, the best local meat and fish.

The walk(s)

The daddy is the South West Coast Path, which begins just up the coast at Poole. But there are plenty of footpaths to take you inland above Swanage, too, possibly involving a pint at the said Scott Arms, or even a trip to Corfe Castle itself.