The Bankes Arms has up to nine hand pumps, several of them dispensing beer brewed next door. The Isle of Purbeck Brewery sits right beside the inn, and its core range — Solar Power, Fossil Fuel, Purbeck IPA — comes through the taps alongside three or four guests and a cider. The brewery only exists because the annual beer festival here went well enough that Jack and Pippa Lightbown decided to start making their own. The inn is National Trust, over two hundred years old, and does not take reservations.
Order the fish and chips and the haddock arrives in a batter made with the brewery's own beer, which also turns up in the chutney. There's sea bass pan-fried with chilli and garlic butter, poached salmon with prawns, beef bourguignon, a Thai red chicken curry, and a vegan bean chilli. The fish comes off Dorset boats, the meat from organic farms. The garden is large and looks out across Studland Bay toward Old Harry Rocks.
Those rocks are about a mile away on foot, along the clifftop coast path to Handfast Point. Three chalk formations — a stack and a stump and the Pinnacles — mark the eastern end of the Jurassic Coast. A castle stood out here by 1381; the sea took it. For a longer walk, the Studland and Ballard Down circular runs about five and a half miles with one steady climb.
The village sits in the lee of Ballard Down beside a curved two-and-a-half-mile sweep of sand, split into South, Middle, Knoll and Shell Bay. All four are shallow and gentle, which is why families come. Roughly nine hundred metres of Knoll Beach is Britain's best-known naturist beach, clearly marked with green-topped posts.
For food off the sand there's Studland Stores with its freshly baked pastries, Joe's Café at the entrance to South Beach doing homemade burgers and onion relish, and Middle Beach Café, the old-fashioned sort, for sandwiches and ice creams.
St Nicholas' Church is early twelfth century and Grade I listed, described by Historic England as "a good example of a small, largely unaltered, Norman church" — the most complete Norman church in Dorset. The tower is deliberately stubby; the foundations couldn't take any more weight, so it was never finished to full height. Look up at the corbel table under the roofline and you'll find grotesque carvings, including a sheela-na-gig and a copulating couple.
Behind the village is heathland — the national nature reserve, home to all six native British reptiles and around seven percent of the UK's Dartford warblers. Out on Godlingston Heath sits the Agglestone Rock, a four-hundred-tonne sandstone slab the Devil is said to have thrown from the Isle of Wight, aiming for Corfe Castle and falling short.
Enid Blyton stayed at the Knoll House Hotel every spring and summer through the 1960s, always in room 40 with a view across the bay. Studland became Toytown, and Mr Plod was based on the village constable, PC Christopher Rhone.
Swanage is two miles over the hill, or reach Sandbanks the other way on the chain ferry, which runs every twenty minutes and saves twenty-five minutes' driving. Out in the seagrass at the southern end of the bay, two species of seahorse have been living quietly since at least the 1970s.
