Worbarrow Tout is a promontory at the eastern end of

Worbarrow Bay Worbarrow Bay is a large broad and shallow bay just to the east of Lulworth Cove on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, England. Location Worbarrow Bay is located about six kilometres south of Wareham and about 16 kilometres west of Swanage. At the ...

Isle of Purbeck The Isle of Purbeck is a peninsula in Dorset, England. It is bordered by water on three sides: the English Channel to the south and east, where steep cliffs fall to the sea; and by the marshy lands of the River Frome and Poole Harbour to the n ...

Dorset Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset (unitary authority), Dors ...

on the south coast of

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, about south of Wareham and about west of

Swanage Swanage () is a coastal town and civil parish in the south east of Dorset, England. It is at the eastern end of the Isle of Purbeck and one of its two towns, approximately south of Poole and east of Dorchester. In the 2011 census the civil ...

. Immediately to its east is Pondfield Cove. Worbarrow Tout ("tout" means lookout) was originally part of

Gad Cliff Gad Cliff is a south-facing cliff face, immediately to the east of Worbarrow Tout and Pondfield Cove, on the south coast of the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, England. Behind it is Gold Down, part of the Lulworth Ranges. Location Gad Cliff is l ...

to its east, but sea erosion has virtually separated the two completely.

Geology

The Tout has a distinct pointed shape. It has steep angular layers of rock that visibly demonstrate the complex sedimentary folding that affected this area and that were caused by tectonic pressures as the African and European continents collided some 30 million years ago. The cliff sediments were then twisted horizontally and this is why the Chalks that are between 85 and 145 million years old are found at the rear of the bay. The sediments that face the sea at the front of the bay and form the peninsula Worbarrow Tout are the 150-million-year-old

Portland limestone Portland stone is a limestone from the Tithonian stage of the Jurassic period quarried on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. The quarries are cut in beds of white-grey limestone separated by chert beds. It has been used extensively as a building sto ...

s and 147-million-year-old

Purbeck Beds The Purbeck Group is an Upper Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous lithostratigraphic group (a sequence of rock strata) in south-east England. The name is derived from the district known as the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset where the strata are exposed in ...

Fossil zone

The localities along the Jurassic Coast include a large range of important

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

zones. The Purbeck lagoonal limestones and the shales that are exposed in the cliffs of Worbarrow Tout contain dinosaur footprints and have abundant brackish water

bivalves Bivalvia (), in previous centuries referred to as the Lamellibranchiata and Pelecypoda, is a class of marine and freshwater molluscs that have laterally compressed bodies enclosed by a shell consisting of two hinged parts. As a group, bival ...

gastropods The gastropods (), commonly known as snails and slugs, belong to a large taxonomic class of invertebrates within the phylum Mollusca called Gastropoda (). This class comprises snails and slugs from saltwater, from freshwater, and from land. Ther ...

and

ostracod Ostracods, or ostracodes, are a class of the Crustacea (class Ostracoda), sometimes known as seed shrimp. Some 70,000 species (only 13,000 of which are extant) have been identified, grouped into several orders. They are small crustaceans, typic ...

s. The rocky seabed is the most easterly location on the south coast for colonies of a rare and protected species of slow growing

coral Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and sec ...

, called the Pink Seafan. This is one of only two species of fan-corals that is to be found in British waters.

References

{{Jurassic Coast Isle of Purbeck Cliffs of England Jurassic Coast