East Lulworth is a village and

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of parishes, w ...

nine miles east of Dorchester, near Lulworth Cove, in the county of

Dorset Dorset ( ; Archaism, archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by Somerset to the north-west, Wiltshire to the north and the north-east, Hampshire to the east, t ...

, England. The village, which consists of 17th-century

thatch Thatching is the craft of building a roof with dry vegetation such as straw, Phragmites, water reed, Cyperaceae, sedge (''Cladium mariscus''), Juncus, rushes, Calluna, heather, or palm branches, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away fr ...

ed cottages, is dominated by the barracks of the

Royal Armoured Corps The Royal Armoured Corps is the armoured arm of the British Army, that together with the Household Cavalry provides its armour capability, with vehicles such as the Challenger 2 and the Warrior tracked armoured vehicle. It includes most of the Ar ...

Gunnery School who use a portion of the Purbeck Hills as a gunnery range. The parish population recorded at the 2021 census was 241. An area east of the village is known as Whiteway. The nearby Lulworth Estate grounds contain the first

Roman Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...

chapel A chapel (from , a diminutive of ''cappa'', meaning "little cape") is a Christianity, Christian place of prayer and worship that is usually relatively small. The term has several meanings. First, smaller spaces inside a church that have their o ...

to be built after the

Protestant Reformation The Reformation, also known as the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation, was a time of major theological movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the papacy and ...

. It was designed in 1786 by John Tasker in the form of a

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

mausoleum A mausoleum is an external free-standing building constructed as a monument enclosing the burial chamber of a deceased person or people. A mausoleum without the person's remains is called a cenotaph. A mausoleum may be considered a type o ...

at a cost of £2,380 and was the private chapel of the

recusant Recusancy (from ) was the state of those who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and refused to attend Church of England services after the English Reformation. The 1558 Recusancy Acts passed in the reign of Elizabeth I, and temporarily repea ...

Weld family. The Weld-Blundell family, formerly owners of the estate, were descendants of the Welds. The Church of England parish church is dedicated to St. Andrew. Only the perpendicular tower and octagonal font are original from the medieval building; the rest of the church was rebuilt in 1864 to designs of John Hicks, who also designed East Holme church. The church is a

Grade II* listed In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, H ...

building. Henry Rolls (1803–1877) was a shoemaker who taught himself to read and write. He kept a journal of the main happenings of village life from 1824 until 1877. After Henry's death, his son George Rolls (1846–1929) continued the journal, covering the period from 1877 to 1928. George's daughter Agnes Mary Rolls (1879–1961) took over responsibility for the journal from 1929 to 1955.

References

*The Buildings of England by John Newman and Nikolaus Pevsner. Page 195. Published by Penguin Books 1972. Reprint 1975. (For churches).

External links

East Lulworth OPC - information on East Lulworth and its residents over the centuries

Villages in Dorset Civil parishes in Dorset {{Dorset-geo-stub

See also

References

External links