Who owns or controls land around Swanage

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Charities & public bodies Open data

Private estates & MOD Indicative

Swanage, Langton & Worth Local

Who owns Purbeck Heaths NNR

From Natural England's declaration map, 4 March 2020. Seven owners, 3,331 ha.

National Trust	1,389.65 ha
RSPB	833.96 ha
Forestry England	560.43 ha
Natural England	250.00 ha
Rempstone Estate Trust	185.71 ha
Dorset Wildlife Trust / NT	83.24 ha
Amphibian & Reptile Conservation	28.13 ha

Natural England and Amphibian & Reptile Conservation own land here but have no layer of their own on this map — Natural England's 250 ha is largely Hartland Moor and Stoborough Heath. The Dorset Wildlife Trust figure is Brownsea Island, which the National Trust owns and the Wildlife Trust manages.

How to read this map

Solid outlines are drawn from the owners' own published boundary data. They are accurate to roughly 1:50,000 and are not legal title boundaries.

The black line is the Purbeck Heaths reserve designation, not an owner — an unfilled boundary drawn over whoever holds the land beneath it. It spans seven owners at once.

Dashed outlines are indicative sketches. No open dataset maps private estate boundaries, so these show roughly where an estate lies and how big it is — not where its fences run. Treat them as a conversation starter, not evidence.

Land can be owned by one body and managed by another. Much of the Lulworth Ranges is owned freehold by the Weld family and leased to the Ministry of Defence; the Swanage Railway trackbed is owned by Dorset Council and leased to the railway.

Ownership is not the whole story of who controls land. The National Trust, for instance, holds restrictive covenants over land it does not own, limiting what can be done with it. Those holdings are invisible on any of these layers.

The Crown Estate owns most of the foreshore below mean low water and the seabed out to 12 nautical miles, including around Studland, Swanage and Kimmeridge. That is not drawn here.

Sources, licensing and caveats

Boundary data
National Trust land owned — Land Map land-history layer; access layers — National Trust Open Data.
Forestry England legal boundary — Forestry Commission Open Data, Open Government Licence.
RSPB reserves — RSPB Open Data.
National and Local Nature Reserve boundaries — Natural England Open Data Geoportal, Open Government Licence. Purbeck Heaths is reference 1460455, 3,331.13 ha, mapped against OS MasterMap. © Natural England copyright, contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right.
Purbeck Heaths ownership figures — Natural England, National Nature Reserve: Purbeck Heaths, Dorset — Declaration number 01, 2020, tenure map plotted 4 March 2020 (theme ID 1460455). © Natural England 2019; OS licence 100022021.
Durlston, Townsend and the railway alignment are traced from OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.

National Trust land
The "land owned" layer is the Trust's own Land Map land-history data (open the Trust's own viewer), which is far more complete than the access layers. The viewer adds leasehold, disposals and war memorials, and colour-codes acquisitions by 20-year band.
Its caveats matter: it shows freehold acquisitions only, so it misses land the Trust leases and the restrictive covenants it holds over land it does not own; the boundaries are not legal ownership boundaries; and it is refreshed from the Annual Report each September, so a new acquisition can take 12–18 months to appear. Errors can be reported to OpenData@nationaltrust.org.uk.

Before publishing: the RSPB End User Agreement requires written permission before their boundaries appear in a public web map. Email dataunit@rspb.org.uk, or switch the RSPB layer off.

Attribution required on any published map
"Contains, or is based on, information supplied by the Forestry Commission. © Crown copyright and database right 2026 Ordnance Survey AC0000814847."
"Data reproduced with the permission of RSPB. © Crown Copyright. Ordnance Survey licence number AC0000813580 (2026)."

Local detail
Peveril Point & The Downs LNR, Swanage Town Council; Townsend, Dorset Wildlife Trust; Last piece of coastal jigsaw now under our care, National Trust, 2 June 2025 — the source for the 2025 acquisition, which is drawn indicatively because no boundary has been published; Swanage Railway Trust.

Estate areas and context
Guy Shrubsole, The ten landowners who own one-sixth of Dorset, Who Owns England (2020); estate websites; Purbeck Heaths NNR.

For parcel-level ownership, HM Land Registry's INSPIRE Index Polygons and corporate ownership data are the definitive source. Land owned by private individuals is not published.