Harbour View Crematorium and Woodland Burial Ground

The 70 acres Harbour View site is a crematorium and woodland burial ground with an exciting and vibrant eco-system of wildlife providing local people with a place of beauty to visit and spend time.

The buildings are a range of spacious and contemporary facilities, some refurbished from the Victorian farm buildings that is its history, some new and designed to draw upon local design and materials and to link our modern society back to our roots and the ancient practices that were before us.

The completion of the crematorium in 2017 completed the circle enabling Harbour View to be a unique facility in the UK where everything that is required from funeral arrangements, through the funeral service itself to the after-care of post-funeral bereavement support.

The Crematorium

Harbour View has its own crematorium; it is in the basement under the Long Barrow. Harbour View Crematorium is one of only four in Dorset and the only one that is in Purbeck. We specialise in offering a relaxed approach, allowing plenty of time for families to celebrate the funeral service, which can be held in any of our ceremony halls (see separate page for ceremony halls).

The Ceremony Halls

The ceremony halls, or service chapels, are where we hold the funeral services. We have three ceremony halls and each of them is available for services associated with funerals that are cremation or burial. Any type of service, whether it be religious or secular, traditional or modern, is perfectly acceptable in our ceremony halls and all of them have access to modern AV facilities. Each of our ceremony halls has its own distinct character, they vary in size and are separated by some distance from each other. This enables us to offer bereaved families a wide selection of choice but always in a framework of relaxed timing, never rushing proceedings and in a peaceful setting.

Commemoration

At Harbour View, we offer a number of ways to commemorate the person that has died using memorials designed to complement the natural landscape we inhabit. You will not find any large headstones or polished granites; these would not be in keeping with a woodland burial ground. All memorials are supplied by us and must be ordered via our office.

The principal memorial at Harbour View is a grave with an accompanying stone in the form of a low-lying tablet; these are engraved with the deceased’s name and some words of commemoration.