Day 9 & 10: Lyme Regis
All right, I'm not sure that anyone cares at this point, seeing as how my trip was a month and a half ago, but seeing as how I have some time and the internet connection is pretty good right now, I'll start on this post.
Lyme Regis is a town on the Dorset Coast of England, which I first read about in one of my sister's guidebooks on my first trip to England. I wanted to make the journey out there then, but it proved to be too far away for us to do it as a day-trip, and we already had too many other things planned. So, when I learned that I would be going back to England, I made sure we put it on our itinerary.
The big attraction of Lyme Regis is the fossil hunting that can be done there. Near the town are large cliffs consisting of alternating layers of limestone and clay, within which many Jurassic age (on the order of 190 million years old) fossils can be found. Periodic mud-slides carry fossils onto the beach, and after being reworked by storms and tides, this means the beach is a great place to find fossils. Due to the abundance of them, you area allowed to keep whatever you find, and there are a number of individuals in town who make their living off of fossil hunting.
Anyway...
My family and I took the train to Axminster on the Friday, followed by a bus to Lyme Regis. We arrived mid-afternoon, but by the time we got there it was too late to go fossil hunting on the beach east of Lyme Regis (because of the tides), which has better prospects, but we did wander along the western beach, and within five minutes on the beach I found a decently preserved ammonite! We wandered all along that beach, finding a number of ammonites, as well as a broken belemnite, and what we later learned was a vertebrae from a dinosaur or possibly an ichthyosaur.
The next day, we wandered around a bit in the morning until the tides were sufficiently low to go out on the eastern beach (between Lyme Regis and Charmouth), and then did more fossil hunting. Between the four of us, we found quite a few fossils, nothing spectacular, but something to remember the trip by. I also met the geologist, Paddy Howe, from the Lyme Regis museum, who has been working in the area for the last thirty years. He was very friendly, we had a good visit, but told us the fossil hunting prospects weren't very good right then; the best time to go is in the winter, but when we went conditions were unusually poor. He took pity on a fellow geologist though, and gave me a couple of fossils he had on him, including a pyritized ammonite (that is, an ammonite fossil where the shell had been entirely replaced by pyrite)!
Okay, on to pictures!
Here is The Cobb, which divides the two beaches I mentioned earlier.
Next, here is a picture of the beach to the west of Lyme Regis, where we started out on Friday. We walked all the way out to the point you can see at the left-hand side of the picture.
Here you can see my family fossil-hunting.
Below are the cliffs.
I'm only going to put up a couple pictures of the fossils I took here, because there are a lot of fairly similar ones.
Awwww...
Here's the town hall, it looks pretty neat.
And this is part of the beach between Lyme Regis and Charmouth
We wandered along the beach to Charmouth, where we stopped for lunch. We did a bit more fossil hunting on the way back, but by then we were running a little short on time (both in our trip and due to the tide starting to come in), so we returned to Lyme Regis, and visited the fossil shops as well as some other sights in the town. Then we picked up our bags from the hotel, caught the bus to Axminster, and from their took the train back to Reading. The next day, was our trip to London, and after that it was time to go home!
Lyme Regis is a town on the Dorset Coast of England, which I first read about in one of my sister's guidebooks on my first trip to England. I wanted to make the journey out there then, but it proved to be too far away for us to do it as a day-trip, and we already had too many other things planned. So, when I learned that I would be going back to England, I made sure we put it on our itinerary.
The big attraction of Lyme Regis is the fossil hunting that can be done there. Near the town are large cliffs consisting of alternating layers of limestone and clay, within which many Jurassic age (on the order of 190 million years old) fossils can be found. Periodic mud-slides carry fossils onto the beach, and after being reworked by storms and tides, this means the beach is a great place to find fossils. Due to the abundance of them, you area allowed to keep whatever you find, and there are a number of individuals in town who make their living off of fossil hunting.
Anyway...
My family and I took the train to Axminster on the Friday, followed by a bus to Lyme Regis. We arrived mid-afternoon, but by the time we got there it was too late to go fossil hunting on the beach east of Lyme Regis (because of the tides), which has better prospects, but we did wander along the western beach, and within five minutes on the beach I found a decently preserved ammonite! We wandered all along that beach, finding a number of ammonites, as well as a broken belemnite, and what we later learned was a vertebrae from a dinosaur or possibly an ichthyosaur.
The next day, we wandered around a bit in the morning until the tides were sufficiently low to go out on the eastern beach (between Lyme Regis and Charmouth), and then did more fossil hunting. Between the four of us, we found quite a few fossils, nothing spectacular, but something to remember the trip by. I also met the geologist, Paddy Howe, from the Lyme Regis museum, who has been working in the area for the last thirty years. He was very friendly, we had a good visit, but told us the fossil hunting prospects weren't very good right then; the best time to go is in the winter, but when we went conditions were unusually poor. He took pity on a fellow geologist though, and gave me a couple of fossils he had on him, including a pyritized ammonite (that is, an ammonite fossil where the shell had been entirely replaced by pyrite)!
Okay, on to pictures!
Here is The Cobb, which divides the two beaches I mentioned earlier.
Next, here is a picture of the beach to the west of Lyme Regis, where we started out on Friday. We walked all the way out to the point you can see at the left-hand side of the picture.
Here you can see my family fossil-hunting.
Below are the cliffs.
I'm only going to put up a couple pictures of the fossils I took here, because there are a lot of fairly similar ones.
Awwww...
Here's the town hall, it looks pretty neat.
And this is part of the beach between Lyme Regis and Charmouth
We wandered along the beach to Charmouth, where we stopped for lunch. We did a bit more fossil hunting on the way back, but by then we were running a little short on time (both in our trip and due to the tide starting to come in), so we returned to Lyme Regis, and visited the fossil shops as well as some other sights in the town. Then we picked up our bags from the hotel, caught the bus to Axminster, and from their took the train back to Reading. The next day, was our trip to London, and after that it was time to go home!
posted by Matt at 8:23 p.m.
3 Comments:
Vacationing with your family looks fun. And I was very confused by the picture of the key at first. I was thinking, "A fossil key? Did they find that? It sure is a familiar fossil." And then I remembered that you're a geologist and put things like that in pictures for the purposes of scale.
Very good. Maryanne gets an 'A'. Yes, it's my geology training that causes me to put things in for scale.
No problem california (do you have a real name?). I hope things are going well, and you'll have to update if you get the chance.
Post a Comment
<< Home