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Stark, wind-battered and treeless, the Isle of Portland is famed above all for its hard white limestone, which has been quarried here for centuries - Wren used it for St Paul's Cathedral, and it clads the UN headquarters in New York. It was also used for the six-thousand-foot breakwater that protects Portland Harbour - the largest artificial harbour in Britain, which was built by convicts in the mid-nineteenth century. Poorer grades of Portland stone are pulverized for cement - the industrial stone-crushing plant is a prominent and unlovely feature of the island. The causeway road by which the Isle of Portland is approached stands on the easternmost section of the Chesil shingle. To the east you get a good view of the harbour, a naval base since 1872. The first settlement you come to, FORTUNESWELL , overlooks the huge harbour and is itself surveyed by a 450-year-old Tudor fortress, Portland Castle (April-Sept daily 10am-6pm; Oct daily 10am-5pm; Nov-March Fri-Sun 10am-4pm; GBP3; EH), commissioned by Henry VIII. South of EASTON , the main village on the island, Wakeham Road holds Pennsylvania Castle (now a private house), built in 1800 for John Penn, governor of the island and a grandson of the founder of Pennsylvania. A couple of hundred yards beyond the house, the seventeenth-century Avice's Cottage , a gift of Marie Stopes, the pioneer of birth control, is home to a small museum (Easter-July, Sept & Oct Mon, Tues & Fri-Sun 10.30am-1pm & 1.30-5pm; Aug & school holidays daily 10.30am-1pm & 1.30-5pm; GBP2), with exhibitions on local shipwrecks, smuggling and quarrying. The cottage owes its name to Thomas Hardy, who described it in his novel, The Well-Beloved . Nearby, in Church Ope Cove , you can see the ruins of St Andrew's Church and eleventh-century Rufus Castle. The craggy limestone of the island rises to 496 feet at Portland Bill , where a lighthouse has guarded the promontory since the eighteenth century. You can climb the 153 steps of the present one, dating from 1906, for the views (Easter-Sept Mon-Fri & Sun 11am-5pm; tours GBP2), and it also houses Portland's tourist office (Easter-Sept Mon, Tues & Thurs-Sun 10am-4pm, Wed 11am-4pm; tel 01305/861233), which can update you on accommodation options in the area, for instance Sturt Corner (tel 01305/822846; under GBP40) and the Pulpit Inn (tel 01305/821237; GBP40-50), both nearby on Portland Bill, and there's a youth hostel in Portland itself, on Castle Road, Castletown (tel 01305/861368).
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