One of the things I love most in the world is that feeling you get when picking a new destination to travel to just for the hell of it- and after doing the sums on the amount of holiday I had left and realising that there was enough for a little autumnal getaway, I recently had the opportunity to break out a map of the UK and get perusing. Lyme Regis had been near the top of the list for quite a long time – mainly thanks to the lure of a fossil-rich coast and the (albeit minuscule) chance of finding an itchyosaur – so, last week, we found ourselves a little AirBnB in the village of Uplyme and set off on the six hour drive down from Norfolk.
Our first couple of days were spent on the pebbles and boulders of Monmouth and Charmouth beaches – and while I knew that both locations were ‘good’ for fossils, I had no idea that (particularly in Monmouth) this would translate to “you will see an ammonite as large as a bin lid every five minutes”. Even before we made it to the famous ammonite graveyard/pavement I was blown away by the scale of the deposits of the ledges here – within the borders of the large ammonites you’d see the remnants of hundreds of other smaller ones. Some of the rocks we picked up to hammer were so full of stuff that it was difficult to really know where to start. The visitor centre informed me that no-one knows why the ammonites are found at such high concentrations here; apparently theories include mass spawning events or ocean currents that slowly shepherded them together, but I kind of like the romance of it remaining a mystery for the ages. The ‘graveyard’ part itself- basically a massive slab of limestone with an inordinately high number of large ammonites within that you’ll hit if you visit at low tide – felt like we were walking on the moon.
When we eventually tired ourselves out (and finally found some fossils that were small enough to take home), we headed back to Lyme to catch the sunset from the beach, before retreating to the beachfront pubs (Swim was great for gluten free stuff) when the cold started to creep in. Then it was just a case of an hour’s uphill walk back to the AirBnB in the pitch black by the light of a single head torch – which was fine, but required a tad more orienteering through dark woodlands than might have been implied by the map. All is forgiven though, because the autumn colours on the way down were glorious.
More from the Jurassic Coast coming up!
