Southwell, Dorset

Southwell is the only village on Portland that nobody bothered to designate as anything, which is either an oversight or the most honest planning decision ever made on the island. The Victorians dug a two-hundred-foot shaft here looking for fresh water, hit brine, gave up, and left the hole in the ground where it remains to this day, unmarked and unmourned. Then the Admiralty turned up, built a secret weapons establishment on the hill, and promptly leaked half of it to the Soviets. For somewhere sheltered on three sides and sitting a mile from Portland Bill, the place has an unusual talent for quietly getting things wrong and carrying on regardless.