St Aldhelm's chapel - Added to Places of Worship in Purbeck, South West

I have just added this to the map of places to fly your drone at Drone Scene:

St Aldhelm's Chapel is a Norman chapel on St Aldhelm's Head just beyond the village of Worth Matravers, Swanage, Dorset.

It stands close to the cliffs, 350 feet above sea level and is a Grade I listed building.

The square stone chapel stands within a low circular earthwork, which may be the remains of a pre-Conquest Christian enclosure.

The building has several architectural features which are unusual for a chapel, most noticeably from the outside its square shape.

That whole stretch of Dorset’s Jurassic coastline is great drone flying land/seascape, but borders the Portland and Lulworth airspace restriction zones so care needs to be exercised if these are in effect (both are normally just Mon-Fri but check before flying).

This location is NOT in either of these FRZ’s

Parking is 1.5 miles away so good walk-in is required to get to the TOAL point which is from a public footpath close to the chapel

The originator declared that this location was not inside a Flight Restriction Zone at the time of being flown on 09/06/2025. It remains the responsibility of any pilot to check for any changes before flying at the same location. Landowner permission may be required before taking off.

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A circular enclosure could indicate a pre-christian Brythonic site, never mind a pre-Norman one! The pagan Britons worshipped their gods in round enclosures called ‘llans’, surrounding a holy well, stone, tree, or other feature; the word survives in modern Welsh, generally meaning an area of ground set aside for religious purposes and very often associated with a saint, with a christian church in his/her honour; there are many such place names in Wales. It was common practice for early chistians converting local villages to adopt the previous holy place as the site of their church, firstly because it demonstrated that the New Order had arrived and you will worship our god now, and secondly, it was where people were accustomed to going to worship. It is possible that some Welsh ‘Llan-’ place names with ‘saints’ who do not appear in church records (these go back well into Roman times in Wales) may be commemorating pre-christian druids!

Aldhelm was an Anglo-Saxon period christian bishop, mostly associated with the Abbey at Malmsbury. n visited this chapel as a 10-year-old, part of a family holiday in Swanage. Amazing place, made quite an impression on me, as did Lulworth Cove & Durdle Door.