A few weeks ago, at the height of the first heatwave, I had the bright idea to go to the beach. That’s not such a bright idea in this part of the world – everyone was at the beach and as a local, I should know that. I mentioned my plans to my mum and she mentioned them to my dad and invited him to join me. I’d thought of Charmouth or Lyme Regis but as soon as it reached them, it became Lyme Regis or Lyme Regis and so the next morning, we were driving through Lyme Regis where, it transpired, there wasn’t a single parking space left in the town by 10.30am. Eventually, we returned, as per my original suggestion, to Charmouth.
Charmouth is a smaller place. A couple of pubs, a couple of restaurants & cafes and the beach visitor centre and that’s it. It doesn’t have as many car parks as Lyme and they’re not as big but they’d opened the field behind the visitor centre and while that wasn’t as big either, it also hadn’t had time to completely fill.
There are two beaches. If you turn left, there’s a slightly more sandy one and if you turn right, there’s a very shingly rocky one. We turned right. You have to be really determined to exercise your Boris-given rights to go to the beach during a pandemic if you’re willing to sunbathe on steep rocky beaches. My plans were to hunt for fossils. This entire bit of coastline is rich in fossils. You’ve probably heard of Mary Anning – this was her territory. I mean, I’m sure she roamed wherever she fancied but she lived in Lyme which is only a mile or two along the shore and she hunted in Charmouth too.
If you haven’t heard of her, she was a prolific fossil hunter from the early 1800s who found some spectacular stuff – an entire ichthyosaur, a pterosaur and two nearly-entire plesiosaurs are among the big things and of course, small things are hugely significant if not as exciting. She was a pioneer of palaeontology who, being a woman in the scientific community of the 1800s, didn’t get the credit she deserved at the time. I was never going to find anything quite as amazing as she found but then she went out in winter storms, when the cliffs were being torn to pieces and exposing new fossils. I keep well away from cliffs.
Small fossil hammers are sold all along the Jurassic Coast for amateur fossil hunters to have a proper dig. You’re not supposed to dig into the cliff here – as with most cliffs, they’re loose and unstable and you don’t want to be the person who triggers thousands of tons of limestone falling onto the beach, especially as you’ll be directly underneath. But people do. I’m quite inclined to believe fossils will be found in sharp-edged rocks and thanks to the hammers, there are a lot of those and of course, they contain nothing of interest, because if they do, they’ll have been pocketed. It’s ok to take fossils from here. Report anything of interest – which I suppose means anything big – and take anything else because otherwise it’s going to get washed away by violent seas.
As it turned out, my best fossil hunting came along the shoreline. As you get further from the beach and closer to the little headland that separates this from the beach at Lyme Regis, it becomes much more boulder-strewn and if you pick your way across the rocks, you’ll find smaller rocks containing fossils caught between them. Ammonites, mostly. A kind of extinct sea snail-slash-squid. They look like spirals in the rock. Someone at work finds a lot of belemnites, which also squid-like creatures but their shells look like tiny bullets or biro caps. I’m no good at finding them but he’ll come home with forty or sixty of them.
I’m also in the habit of collecting interesting rocks – sometimes that means really smooth round ones and sometimes ones that look like they’re made of quartz. And they might well be. Wikipedia says “it is very common in sedimentary rocks”. So I loaded up my bag with fossils and interesting rocks and when we’d reached the headland, we turned back.
I’d brought a picnic with me but Dad hadn’t, so we queued for the little beachside cafe and he got a cup of coffee and a pasty and we ate our lunches on a bench, watching the grockles on the beach. Last summer, when I was in Devon, I noticed that they were trying to reduce plastic waste by encouraging people to take body boards from a box of pre-used ones and then put them back afterwards rather than buying new, because they pretty much only get used for a couple of days before being binned. Pandemics and pre-used boards are not comfortable bed fellows and I was astonished how many people were body boarding. The pandemic has done a lot of good for the environment but I looked at all those chunks of foam and wished the push to re-use them had continued into this summer.
On a brighter note, I realised that virtually all the children out there were wearing rash vests. That wasn’t a thing when I was a kid. We just got burnt. Well, no. We used suncream. Other than one painful accident in Italy, I didn’t burn at all until I was nineteen. But I’m glad to see kids being routinely covered up against the sun.
When we’d eaten, we decided to venture up the cliff. Well, halfway up the cliff. That meant crossing the mouth of the Char, which runs right through the town and onto the beach. If you’re on the beach, it’s pretty easy to get across the delta, especially if you’re running around with no shoes on. We were less keen on picking our way through the tourists and through the water. Because I was fossil hunting among boulders, I’d opted for real shoes rather than the sandals I’ve worn since March and my dad doesn’t do paddling. So we walked up through the car park and crossed via the wooden footbridge. No social distancing here but lots of kids climbing over it to jump into the river below. We waited at the end until it was clear and then gave up and just ran for it, hoping not to be breathed on. At the other side, we watched goings-on in the river. It’s not actually certified clean enough to swim in but I’ve learned since that no river in the UK is, and it doesn’t stop wild swimming, let alone tourists at the beach. Here, there were dogs, and there was one in particular who wasn’t enjoying the swimming – unusual in a golden retriever. It paddled out reluctantly to its humans and then hastened back to the shallows and finally out onto solid land.
We went just far enough up the cliff to be able to look out over Charmouth and the bay. Even the South West Coast Path appears to come inland to miss out that cliff. It’s about 140m, which makes it two-thirds of the height of neighbouring Golden Gap, the highest point on the entire path. It was far too hot to climb all the way up, especially with a bag full of rocks. So we found a bench, commandeered it and enjoyed the view and the passing dogs for a while.
A quick selfie back on the beach and it was time to head home. Since the weather has turned grey lately, I don’t imagine it’ll be quite so busy with body boarders and sunbathers but it’ll still be a great beach for fossil hunting.