Facts
- The Fleet Lagoon was one of the locations used for bouncing bomb testing in the Second World War, that’s right Dam Busters!
- The view of the beach from Abbotsbury has been voted by Country Life magazine as Britain’s third best view, we would have placed it a little higher but we are biased. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2151009.stm
- The Fleet boasts the greatest diversity of wildlife of any lagoon in the UK!
- In the children’s book Moonfleet by John Meade Falkner the village of Moonfleet is based on the parish of East Fleet in Dorset. And the headland in the book called The Snout is Portland Bill.
- The Ferrybridge featured in the film the Damned, when a local stunt man was hired to drive a car off the bridge and into the Fleet.
- Chesil at Wyke and Portland is the site of many ship wrecks. The first recorded in 1641 ‘the Golden Grape’ went down with 20 men on board of which 7 drowned, members of Wyke and Portland risked weather and rough seas to loot its cargo as it washed ashore. Probably the most famous was ‘the Royal Adelaide’ which went down in 1872, off Chesil with 67 men on board, amazingly 60 survived and 2,900 tons of cargo was saved.
- Scaly Crickets Pseudomogoplistes squamiger - until recently the Scaly Cricket was only found on Chesil Beach it is thought that it was brought over from the Mediterranean on landing craft used in the invasion of Sicily. They can now be found at Sark on the Channel Islands, Branscombe in Devon and Granville in Normandy.