Ower Quay
Cottage

A Town That Never Was

At the height of Ower's importance as a trading port, Edward I commissioned a new town to be built just along the shore. Ower had become so significant a hub of commerce that the Crown appointed Richard de Bosco, Constable of Corfe Castle, to lay out streets, lanes, a market, a church and plots for merchants. The town was to be called Newton.

It never came to be. The harbour channel was too shallow, the heathland soil too poor, and the established ports of Wareham and the growing town of Poole offered too much competition. The name survives in a handful of cottages south-east of Ower — all that remains of Edward's ambition.

The End of an Era — Purbeck's Principal Port

Down to the early eighteenth century, Ower Quay was the principal port of the Isle of Purbeck — the primary loading point for the celebrated Purbeck stone and marble shipped to build churches, cathedrals and grand houses across England and beyond. The New Forest timber used in the building of Corfe Castle was landed here. As the century turned, the stone trade gradually moved south to Swanage, and Ower's days as a working port drew quietly to a close.

Yet the quay remained vital for a second trade: ball clay. Extracted from the Purbeck heathlands for over two thousand years, this prized material — regarded by Josiah Wedgwood himself as the finest in the world — was carted to Ower for onward shipment to Stoke-on-Trent and the great pottery houses of England.

Ower's remote position on the sheltered southern shore also made it a natural haunt for contraband. Throughout the 1700s, high duties on tea, spirits and tobacco drove a thriving smuggling trade along the Dorset coast, and isolated harbour inlets like Ower — far from the eyes of customs officers — were prized landing points for illicit cargoes moved across the heathland under cover of dark.

A Place of Literary Note

The landscape surrounding Ower Quay has long drawn writers and storytellers. Thomas Hardy set much of his Wessex fiction in the country that stretches from Dorchester to Poole Harbour — the great heath, the harbour's edge, the Purbeck hills visible from the cottage garden are all Hardy country. Frederick Treves, the Dorchester-born surgeon and author whose Highways and Byways in Dorset (1906) remains the most celebrated book ever written about the county, knew these waters well — he moored his yacht along this coast and came to Ower, describing it as a place that had once been "a place of consequence, from whence was exported the stone of the Isle of Purbeck, as well as the china clay dug out of the heaths," fallen silent since 1710 yet still bearing traces of its quay and the old road westward. He also noted, with some bemusement, the peppercorn agreement of 1695 — observing that a pound of pepper and a football made "a curious commercial instrument, of which the chronicler furnishes no explanation."

But perhaps the most vivid literary connection belongs to Enid Blyton, who visited the Isle of Purbeck for over twenty years. Corfe Castle — four miles from the cottage — became Kirrin Castle in the Famous Five. Brownsea Island, clearly visible from the water's edge at Ower, became her mysterious "Keep Away Island." The smuggling tunnels and hidden coves of the Purbeck coast — including, almost certainly, Ower itself — fed directly into Five Go to Smuggler's Top. And the golf club at Studland, just up the road, was purchased by Blyton and her husband in 1951 and remains open today.

Dorset writer Rodney Legg, in Purbeck Century, captured what all these writers seem to have felt — describing Ower Quay as "the most peaceful and poignant place in the Isle of Purbeck."