Big globe
The Big globe ( ger .: Great Globe ) has a diameter of about 3 meters and 40 tons in weight. The 15-part globe from 1887 was made from the local limestone deposits of Purbeck-Portland in England and is one of the largest stone spheres in the world.
location
The Big Globe is located a few meters below Durlston Castle within Durlston Country Park , a 1.13 km² (280 hectare) landscaped park and nature reserve. The park is located south of Swanage on the Isle of Purbeck in the county of Dorset , on the south coast of England .
Swanage is home to a number of historic quarries , mostly along the cliffs to the south. In these quarries, Portland stone , Purbeck stone and Purbeck marble were quarried.
history
George Burt (1816-1894), from Swanage, was a stonemason and quarry owner. He became a successful stone merchant and building contractor in London, a philanthropist, and a very wealthy businessman. Swanage was the birthplace of Burt, from there he later traded in British natural stones and he wanted the town to develop into a prosperous place. In Swanage, Burt built Purbeck House , a large stone building, for himself .
In 1862, George Burt bought the rolling land around Durlston Head. There were also a few quarries on this land, from which his company extracted limestone as cut stone . There were numerous quarries in operation there until the 19th century, from which large quantities of limestone were transported by sea for buildings in London . Burt wanted to develop the area into a tourist attraction. In 1887 he built his Folly Durlston Castle on the hill at the south end of Durlston Bay . There are historic quarries in the park, such as the Tilly Whim Caves , which has not been quarried since 1810. Burt opened the Tilly Whim Caves for sightseeing in 1887. The underground quarry was finally closed to the public in 1976 due to the risk of falling rocks.
Burt also had the Great Globe made , a 40-tonne globe, three meters in diameter, in which the world map is engraved according to the findings of 1880.
Installation site
The sphere towers over the coastline of this park to about 40 meters above the sea, which is visited by numerous tourists today. Around the Great Globe there are stone tablets with texts by William Shakespeare and the Bible , as well as maps of the English Channel and the United Kingdom, and other insights into the natural history of the world.
A staircase leads to the globe. In the past, visitors could get right up to the globe, today it is demarcated by an iron fence. In the immediate vicinity of the globe, there are eight large stone blocks in the green area that represent the compass.
The sphere is a document for the time and represents the idea of the world from the British imperial point of view in the Victorian era towards the end of the 19th century.
See also
Web links
- Illustration of the Great Globe
- 360 degree view of the Great Globe (Java required)
Individual evidence
- ↑ David Lewer, Dennis Smale: Swanage Past . Phillimore Press, Chichester 2004, pp. 113-125, ISBN 1-86077-311-7 .
- ↑ The Isle of Pirbeck, Durlston Castle & The Globe . Isleofpurbeck.com. 2010. Archived from the original on April 1st, 2010. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 1, 2010.
Coordinates: 50 ° 35 ′ 41.9 ″ N , 1 ° 57 ′ 7.4 ″ W.