Isle of Portland
Portland is a tied island, 6 kilometres long by 2.7 kilometres wide, in the English Channel. It is 8 kilometres south of the resort of Weymouth, forming the southernmost point of the county of Dorset, England. The name Portland is used for one of the British Sea Areas, and has been exported as the name of North American and Australian towns.
About Isle of Portland in brief
Portland is a tied island, 6 kilometres long by 2.7 kilometres wide, in the English Channel. It is 8 kilometres south of the resort of Weymouth, forming the southernmost point of the county of Dorset, England. Portland is a central part of the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site on the Dorset and east Devon coast, important for its geology and landforms. The name Portland is used for one of the British Sea Areas, and has been exported as the name of North American and Australian towns. Portland has been inhabited since at least the Mesolithic period, and the Romans occupied Portland, reputedly calling it Vindelis. Rufus Castle, standing over Church Ope Cove, was built for William II of England soon after the conquest of England by his father William the Conqueror. In 1539 King Henry VIII ordered the construction of Portland Castle for defence against attacks by the French; the castle cost £4,964. In the 17th century, chief architect and Surveyor-General to James I, Inigo Jones, surveyed the area and introduced the local Portland stone to London, using it in his Banqueting House, Whitehall, and for repairs on St Paul’s Cathedral. After the First World War, a quarry was opened by The Crown Estate to provide stone for the Cenotaph in Whitehall and half a million gravestones for war cemeteries, and after the Second World War hundreds of thousands of gravestones were hewn for soldiers who had fallen on the Western Front.
There have been railways in Portland since the early 19th century. The Merchant’s Railway was the earliest—it opened in 1826 and ran from the quarries at the north of Tophill to a pier at Castletown, from where the Portland stone was shipped around the country. The line closed to passengers in 1952 and the final goods train ran in April 1965. The Royal Institution for the Preservation of Life in Portland, which was stationed at Portland from 1826, was withdrawn in 1851. At the end of the 19th. century the line was extended to the top of the island as the Church of Opepe Cove was extended. At Chesil Beach, a station in Chmusmuswell, a low isthmus low behind the high cliffs, was a station at Victoria Square. The only way off the island is along the Cheseway lee line, running through the cliffs at Easton, running north to a loop to a station on the north coast of the Isle of Portland. The population of Portland is 12,797, with a population of 2,000 on the mainland. The harbour is now a civilian port and popular recreation area, and was used for the 2012 Olympic Games. It was made by the building of stone breakwaters between 1848 and 1905, and played prominent roles during the First and Second World Wars; ships of the Royal Navy and NATO countries worked up and exercised in its waters until 1995.
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This page is based on the article Isle of Portland published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
