The Timeline at Durlston Castle has several quotations as detailed below.
The first quotation reads:
'Old mammals, dinosaurs tread. Crocodiles
congealed between the cliffstone's ammonites
and marble's burnishable snail whorls
time. Unmanned, in the rocks' mirror distorts.
Paul Hyland'
Paul Hyland is described here: visit link
'Paul Hyland is a travel writer and poet. His first book, Purbeck: The Ingrained Island (Gollancz/Dovecote Press), has been in print for over twenty years. All his biographies of places - Isle of Wight, the Congo, the Godavari (Andhra Pradesh) and the Tagus - were books of the year in UK or US broadsheets. Backwards Out of the Big World: A Voyage into Portugal (HarperCollins/Flamingo, 1997), was a book of the year in the Guardian and the Sunday Times. Raleigh's Last Journey (HarperCollins, 2003), is an intriguing excursion into pure history.
His powerful, elusive volume, Poems of Z (broadcast by Maurice Denham and featured on Pick of the Week), was followed by The Stubborn Forest (Alice Hunt Bartlett Award) and Kicking Sawdust - `unstrained, carefully judged and razory' (Lines Review) - all from Bloodaxe Books, for whom he wrote Getting into Poetry, `essential reading...the guide to the contemporary poetry scene' (Suzi Feay).
His plays, drama-documentaries and features are broadcast by the BBC. He has won awards, worked on many residencies, gained public commissions and collaborated with photographers, musicians, composers, letter cutters and visual artists (traditional and digital) on music theatre, installations, stained glass, inscriptions and web sites.'
The second quotation reads:
'All living things, humans, gnats, slugs, trees
have their origin in stardust.
Virtually every atom was forged in stars
that formed, grew old and died
before the sun and the earth came into being.
Nigel Calder'
Wikipedia describes Nigel Calder: visit link
'Nigel Calder (born 2 December 1931) is a British science writer.
Between 1956 and 1966, Calder wrote for the magazine New Scientist, serving as editor from 1962 until 1966. Since that time, he has worked as an independent author and TV screenwriter. He has conceived and scripted thirteen major documentaries and series concerning popular science subjects broadcast by the BBC and Channel 4 (London), with accompanying books. For his television work he received the Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science during 1972. During 2004, his book Magic Universe was shortlisted for The Aventis Prizes for Science Books.
In 1970, Calder participated in the original [Earth Day] by proclaiming "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."
Nigel Calder is the son of the late Lord (Peter) Ritchie-Calder, a brother of the historian Angus Calder (1942–2008), mathematician Allan Calder and educationist Isla Calder (1946–2000), and the father of travel writer Simon Calder. His other children are Sarah (business writer), Penny (museums writer and consultant), Jo (working in an IT company) and Kate (public relations consultant). His wife Liz is his literary agent and was formerly an adviser on language teaching for the London Chambers of Commerce.
Calder is a long-standing sceptic of global warming. As early as 1980, he predicted that within 20 years "the much-advertised heating of the earth by the man-made carbon-dioxide ‘greenhouse’ [will fail] to occur; instead, there [will be] renewed concern about cooling and an impending ice age". Calder participated in the polemic film The Great Global Warming Swindle. He also co-authored The Chilling Stars. Regarding global warming, Calder has said that "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system." '
Our third quotation reads:
'What will
You do now
With the gift
Of your
Left life?
Carolann
Duffy'
Wikipedia describes Carolann Duffy:visit link
'Carol Ann Duffy, CBE, FRSL (born 23 December 1955) is a British poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's poet laureate in May 2009. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold the position.
Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.'
The fourth quotation reads:
'Up here,
Nudging the sky.
You're no more
Than a pinprick
On the timeline
Stretched taut
By lynchet & tumulus
And the tremendous
Secrets of the rock
Time out of mind
Under turf & furze.
Jane Evans'
It is unclear as to who Jane Evans is but there is a Mary-Jane Evans who resides in Bath who is a renowned Dorset artist.
Finally there is a longer poem near the entrance to Durlston Castle which reads:
'Then might those
animals return
of which the
memorials
are preserved
in the ancient rocks.
The Iguanodon
might reappear
in the woods,
& the Ichthyosaur
in the sea.
While the Pterodactyl
might flit again
through
umbrageous groves
of tree ferns.
Coral reefs
might be prolonged
beyond the
Arctic Circle
where the whale
and Narwal
now abound.
Turtles might
deposit eggs
in the sand
of the sea beach
where now
the walrus sleeps
& where the seal
is drifted
on the ice-face.
Charles Lyell'
Wikipedia describes Charles Lyell:visit link
'Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS (14 November 1797 – 22 February 1875) was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by the same processes still in operation today. Lyell was a close and influential friend of Charles Darwin.'