Qualla: Clavell Tower

Clavell Tower: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Huligan0, CC BY-SA 3.0. Engineers numbered each of the 16,272 stones with a marker and a camera before lifting them off the cliff. The Reverend John Richards Clavell had not anticipated this when he raised his Tuscan folly above Hen Cliff in about 1830 - he was simply a country clergyman with a freshly inherited estate, a love of observatories, and an enviable view. But the same chalk-grey cliffs that gave the tower its 330-foot perch above Kimmeridge Bay were dissolving beneath it. By 2006, the sea had crept close enough that the only way to save the building was to take it apart and walk it inland.

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Image: Huligan0 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Clavell Tower: A Clergyman's Indulgence

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robin Lucas, CC BY-SA 2.0. John Richards inherited the Smedmore estate in 1817 and, in keeping with the genteel custom of the day, added Clavell to his name. Folly-building was already a polite Georgian habit - a way for landed gentlemen to perform learning and leisure on the skyline of their own land - an...

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Image: Robin Lucas | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clavell Tower: Hardy's Hill

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben from Southampton, England, CC BY 2.0. Thomas Hardy walked these cliffs with Eliza Nicholls, his first love, and Clavell Tower became one of their places. He later used an illustration of it in his Wessex Poems, fixing the building in literary geography long after the romance had faded. The Dorset coast that Hardy mad...

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Image: Ben from Southampton, England | CC BY 2.0

Clavell Tower: The Black Tower

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JimChampion, CC BY-SA 4.0. P. D. James found the desolate building so unnerving she made it the centrepiece of her 1975 detective novel The Black Tower, sending Adam Dalgliesh to a sinister Dorset clifftop to investigate a death. Anglia Television filmed the adaptation here in 1985 with Roy Marsden as Dalg...

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Image: JimChampion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clavell Tower: A Tower in Motion

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JimChampion, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the early 2000s, the cliff edge was within metres of the foundations. The Landmark Trust, which acquired the tower in 2002, decided the only way to keep it was to move it. Work began on 5 September 2006. Each of the tower's 16,272 stones was numbered, photographed, and lifted ...

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Image: JimChampion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clavell Tower: A Room With Every View

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PaleCloudedWhite, CC BY-SA 4.0. The tower today sleeps two, which is the kind of detail that sounds like a joke until you stand inside it. The top-floor living room offers a 360-degree view of the surrounding coast and countryside, and rental income from the holiday let pays for the maintenance of the building ...

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Image: PaleCloudedWhite | CC BY-SA 4.0