George Burt was born in Swanage in 1816, into a quarrying town that had been carving Purbeck and Portland limestone for centuries. His uncle, John Mowlem, had left Swanage as a young man and built one of the great Victorian construction firms, the company that still bears his name. Mowlem brought his nephew into the business, and together they paved London with Dorset stone. By 1862, with money pouring in from quarries and contracts, the two of them set about giving something back to their hometown. Mowlem built a reading room and public library, the Mowlem Institute. Burt bought a chunk of the cliffs at Durlston Head, including the quarries that supplied their firm, and set about turning it into a tourist attraction.

Burt commissioned the Weymouth architect G. R. Crickmay to design what he called a castle, and W. M. Hardy to build it, entirely from the local stone. It went up in 1886 and 1887, three storeys of crenellated limestone with a sundial and inscribed tablets giving clock times in distant cities and tide tables for the world. The point was always practical. The 'castle' was a restaurant, designed to feed and entertain the day trippers Burt expected to walk down from Swanage to enjoy his cliffs. Around it, between 1887 and 1891, he installed the rest of his vision: cast iron bollards shipped down from London, stone plaques carved with quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible, maps of the English Channel and the United Kingdom rendered in stone, and miscellaneous facts about the natural world arrayed along the footpaths. Visitors were meant to learn as they walked.

South of the castle, set into the grass on the cliff edge, sits the object that made Burt's estate famous. The Great Globe was carved in 1887 from fifteen sections of Portland limestone, weighed roughly forty tonnes, and represented the world at a scale of about one inch to 130 miles. The continents were carved in relief. The oceans were named. Around the globe, more stone tablets gave latitudes, longitudes, distances between cities, and improving thoughts about creation. It was Victorian self-improvement made literal: a piece of public sculpture that doubled as a geography lesson, set down at the end of a hilltop walk with the English Channel behind it. The globe has weathered for over a century now, the carved features softened by salt and rain, but it remains one of the most photographed stone objects in Dorset.

In the 1890s, an engineering team working for Guglielmo Marconi climbed onto Durlston Castle's roof and used it as a transmission point for some of the earliest practical experiments in wireless telegraphy. They were trying to send signals across to the Isle of Wight, twenty miles east across the Channel. The castle was an obvious choice: it stood high and exposed on the south coast, with nothing between it and Marconi's other stations except open water. Those experiments were part of the broader work that established radio as a workable technology by the turn of the century. The castle changed hands repeatedly after that, drifting through private owners until Dorset County Council bought it in 1973. It was made a Grade II listed building in 1983.

In 2010 and 2011 the Council restored both the castle and the Great Globe. The building now serves as the visitor centre for Durlston Country Park and National Nature Reserve, a 280-acre stretch of coastal grassland, woodland and limestone cliff that forms part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. There is a cafe, an art gallery, and a clear viewpoint south across the Channel. Walking paths lead out to Tilly Whim Caves, the Anvil Point Lighthouse, and the bird-rich cliffs where guillemots and razorbills nest in spring. Burt's quirky restaurant, with its inscribed walls and its giant stone Earth, has become exactly what he hoped it would be: the front door to one of the loveliest stretches of the English coast.