Chesil Beach

Chesil is often called a tombolo, though research shows it is a barrier beach, a bar of shingle about twenty-nine kilometres long running from West Bay to the Isle of Portland, which it ties to the mainland, holding back the Fleet, a brackish lagoon up to a kilometre wide and the largest of its kind in Britain. Its strangest property is the grading: the pebbles are pea-sized at the western end and rise steadily to fist-sized at Portland, sorted by wave energy over thousands of years so consistently that fishermen landing in fog were said to know their position by the size of the stones. The bank reaches fifteen metres high and is a natural sea defence for the villages behind. The Fleet holds eelgrass beds and a swannery at Abbotsbury where mute swans have nested since at least the eleventh century.

History

The name comes from the Old English ceosel or cisel, gravel or shingle. In the age of sail the beach was a deadly lee shore in south-westerly gales, and a string of coastguard stations with lookouts and cottages ran along it from Chiswell to West Bay; local fishermen developed the lerret, a double-ended open boat rowed by four for seine-net fishing off the shingle. The Great Storm of 1824 wrecked much of the villages of Fleet and Chiswell, and today the beach and the Fleet lagoon are part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site (Wikipedia, Chesil Beach).

The landscape

• The graded pebbles - stones sorted by size along twenty-nine kilometres.
• The Fleet lagoon - brackish water held behind the bank, up to a kilometre wide.
• Abbotsbury Swannery - a managed colony of mute swans nesting since medieval times.
• The shingle bar - the barrier beach joining the Isle of Portland to the mainland.

When to go

April to October; the swannery opens roughly March to October and cygnets hatch in May and June. The beach itself is accessible year-round but exposed, and winter storms rework it.

Practical notes

Walking on the shingle is exhausting and the bank is steep. The sea off Chesil shelves very steeply with a dangerous undertow, and swimming is unsafe along most of it. Access to the central section is restricted in the bird nesting season.

Nearby

Abbotsbury and its swannery lie midway; Portland and Weymouth are at the eastern end.

Key facts