Not many people have a plesiosaurus in their back room. But on the Isle of Purbeck, in Dorset, there's a man who's spent years quietly digging one from a local fossil bed and assembling the skeleton at home, where he shows it to selected visitors.
The travel writer Nicholas Crane has seen the 25ft monster, marvelled at it, and been sworn to secrecy. But he can say it's not far from his favourite walk, which crosses the great promontory of St Aldhelm's Head and the nearby cliffs at Dancing Ledge.
"When you scratch at the surface of Purbeck, strange things like that start emerging," he says. "Those who've lived there for some time don't think of themselves as part of the mainland any more, and it can be difficult for newcomers to break in."
Crane likes Purbeck for its jigsaw of geology - white cliffs and downs in the middle, and a Channel coastline of dark limestone - and because it's the first stretch of country you come to along the south coast of England that hasn't been overdeveloped.
"Eastwards from here it's built up all the way to Kent, but once you're in Purbeck you're on this extended structure of coast and high ground where you can walk for two days and never see a car.
"It also lies at the very bottom of the country, like a fulcrum, a sort of balancing point for England's future. It has a very powerful aura about it, and St Aldhelm's Head is like the pivot or rocking stone."
Perched 350ft above the sea is the tiny St Aldhelm's Chapel, built in 1140 by a local man who watched helplessly from the headland as a boat carrying his daughter and her husband was overwhelmed by a sudden storm. It's the only church in England that doesn't have one wall facing directly east towards Jerusalem.
Three miles east of it is Dancing Ledge, where Crane finished his recent walk along the line of longitude of two degrees west, which runs down the country like the spine of a book. He'd been to Purbeck before, but this was the first time it got under his skin.
"The coast here is very architectural because so much of it was dug and shaped by the quarrymen. There are ledges and caves and dips and slots where they used to lower the stone to the barges below and, when you look down, it's like the foundations of a lost city, a corner of Atlantis."
He goes camping and walking in Purbeck with his wife and three children, but prefers to walk alone. "I find I can produce a state of self-hypnosis through the simple rhythm of taking steps, and that has the effect of letting my mind slip off into areas which it's impossible to inhabit while living and working in the centre of London."
Wild weather is part of the coastal landscape, he says, and he doesn't mind a gale roaring up the Channel and trying to take his hair off. He does without bright, modern Gore-tex, relying instead on a tightly-woven Ventile cotton jacket and his sturdy umbrella: "If you can sail small boats, you can handle an umbrella in a gale," he says.
"It's a matter of spilling the wind. I learnt the technique from shepherds when I was walking in northern Spain - they use umbrellas for all sorts of things, including fending off their own dogs and screening themselves from the sun."
Men of marble
There's hardly a cathedral in England that doesn't have some Purbeck marble in it, and in the one in nearby Salisbury you can't turn round without seeing a pillar, slab or pediment cut from this sombre, blue-grey stone.
The Romans were the first to quarry the thin seam of marble. The industry of cutting it, and the ordinary limestone around it, achieved its heyday between 1100 and 1300AD, employing hundreds.
After blips of popularity over the centuries, it now ticks over with fewer than 50 workers providing material for restoration work and satisfying a mini-fashion for "ethnic" English stone.
Purbeck's product comes out in smaller blocks than its paler, more famous neighbour at Portland. But the Company of Marblers, a medieval guild also known as the Society of the Purbeck Stone Cutters and Marblers, still has 80 members and keeps up its old traditions, including the entry fee for new members of six shillings and eight pence, a quart of beer and a penny loaf.
David Burt, Warden of the Company, says that the most important tradition was a meeting every Shrove Tuesday in the old town hall at Corfe Castle, after which the members kick a football - originally a pig's bladder - around the streets and present a pound of peppercorns to the occupants of a house at Ower Bay.
This is the site, on the southern edge of Poole Harbour, of a quay where much of the stone used to be loaded on to ships. "It must have something to do with the phrase 'peppercorn rent'," says Burt. "They've got jars and jars of the stuff down there, enough to keep them for years.
"The tradition was kept up long after the stone cutters stopped using the quay. After that, they started using the port of Swanage instead, where they'd drive the horses into the water pulling carts with huge wheels, and the stone was put on to rowing boats and taken out to the ketches or larger boats."
The cliff quarries that have left their mark on the coastline mostly went out of use in the 19th century. The last big extraction there was in the 1920s, but this came to an abrupt end when the quarrying company foundered in the Wall Street Crash.
The practicals
Nearest stations are Wareham and Wool. the Wilts and Dorset bus company sells explorer tickets at £5 for unlimited daily travel: call 01202 673555. For information about Purback, inc accomodation and a brochure on the Purbeck Way walking route, contact Wareham Tourist Information Centre on 01929 552740. For general info on Dorset, contact Dorset County Council tourism department on 01305 221001/2/3. Outdoor Leisure Map No 15: Purbeck and South Dorset.
