Categories
Days out Dorset UK

Tout Quarry Sculpture Park

Still Falling by Antony Gormley (1983)

On Portland, an abandoned stone quarry turned into a stone sculpture park.

Tout Quarry Sculpture Park

Tout Quarry Nature Reserve and Sculpture Park is an abandoned stone quarry which has now been turned into a stone sculpture park. Now one of Portland’s most popular attractions, you can discover over 60 hidden sculptures in the Quarry, such as Anthony Gormley’s ‘Still Falling’ sculpture and enjoy the stunning views over Chesil Beach and Portland Harbour. The park is also a haven for nature especially for those with a love of wild flowers and butterflies.

Tout Quarry Sculpture Park began in 1983 with artists residencies, where well known and emerging artists created both temporary and permanent work in response to the labyrinths and gullies of quarry workings within the 40 acre site – giving back to the Quarry where in the past so much had been taken away for buildings in London and around the world.

Today, the stone faces and fallen crags have now become a living sculpture garden. The maze of paths through the quarry makes finding each of the etchings in the sculpture park like a game of hide-and-seek, as visitors scramble over boulders and squeeze through mini-valleys to find the little works of art spread across the grounds.

You can download a trail leaflet showing each of the sculptures from the Dorset Council website.

 

We should have walked round with the map, identifying each piece as we found them, because afterwards it’s very hard to work out which piece is which.  And at the time we got lost and had to do a lot of scrambling over rocks to find a way out of a gully.

 

The only recognisable name for me is Antony Gormley, who was the first artist to work in the quarry in 1983, when he created the carving “Still Falling”. This is a life-size figure incised into the rock face. The figure was purposely distanced from the viewer by the depth of the quarried space below.

 

Gormley commented in 1983:

“The quarry itself is a powerful inspiration and tribute to the small bands of men that worked it, using blocks and wedges as well as natural layering and fissuring to cut the stone. Their technique (using neither complex machinery nor explosives) was a mixture of science, intuition and hard team work that is a model for us all… Working with stone is a fine job. Working on stone in a quarry is a challenge. You have to consider the material as a part of the place; as part of the earth.”  [source]

 

Geologically, The feet are in ‘Roach Stone‘- a shelly limestone full of fossils.  The body is in ‘Whit Bed‘ – a good quality limestone, and the head is in ‘Base Bed‘ – a very fine white limestone.

 

View of Portland Harbour.and Chesil Beach from the quarry

 

An old tramway in the quarry

One reply on “Tout Quarry Sculpture Park”

Country diary: A giant’s playground of limestone blocks and infinite pebbles
Isle of Portland, Dorset: On a rare sunny day this autumn, I come to a place of melancholic grandeur carved from wind and wave
Anita Roy
Mon 11 Dec 2023
The Guardian

 

“My name is not Ishmael, but like the narrator of Moby-Dick, sometimes I have the urge – with little or no money in my purse – to see the watery part of the world. November is a damp and drizzly month in the soul for Ishmael, and I too have grown a bit grim about the mouth, so I head south-west to the sea, and along Chesil Beach to the Isle of Portland.

 

The sun shrugs off what has been weeks of cloud and damp, and the air is sharp, promising frost later. It feels like a quickening. Just the sort of tonic that Herman Melville would prescribe to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation.

 

I park next to the grim edifice of St George’s church on the western side of the tied island and walk along a footpath leading to Tout quarry. The stone for which Portland is famous lies all around: tumbling down to the water’s edge in slabs, hunks, steps and outcrops. As the sun sets, I clamber around a giant’s playground of limestone blocks. The split rocks reveal sea creatures that last saw the light of day 150 million years ago, their spirals and curlicues peppering the stone, delicate as the ossicles of the inner ear.

 

Stone has been extracted from Tout since the late 18th century – the last significant hunks hauled away in 1983. Since then, this 13-hectare site has been managed as a nature reserve, home now to a host of wildflowers and one of the UK’s rarest butterflies – the silver-studded blue.

 

It is also a sculpture park, with the artworks left to be found with neither signpost nor labels, as if released into the wild rather than placed in an open-air gallery. The art is all around, it seems: latent, needing only time and weather to be revealed. From a certain angle, one piece of cliff turns out to be a face – the noble profile and full lips of a man, half-eroded on one side, staring fixedly out to sea.

 

Above me, the gulls take on a crow, the air is filled with their petulant three-note hinge-squeak punctuated by the crow’s disgruntled cronk. It’s a suitable soundtrack for the melancholy grandeur of this landscape, itself carved from wind and wave. I cannot escape the thought that even this great face, so apparently immutable, will eventually crumble to become just another pebble, one of the countless stones on Chesil Beach.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *