Sea Change

Some of you may have looked at the first photograph in the previous post ("Lyme Bay from Black Ven") and thought: what the hell is that thing lying among the rocks on the beach? Which is precisely what I thought when I saw it. Not least because there is a sad tradition of holidaymakers along the south and east coasts of the British Isles getting blown to pieces each summer by mines laid out to sea during two world wars that have subsequently drifted ashore, and lain buried in mud and sand for decades until some fool decided to give one a kick. It is also not unknown for drums of noxious gases and fluids to be lost or dumped at sea in the Channel, only to wash up on the beach. So, I approached it with caution, not least because of the obvious antiquity of its riveted construction.

At that point, we had only just started a morning's fossil hunt on the beach at Black Ven, a part of the coast we hadn't really explored before. As anyone who has collected on those beaches will know, the best place for the casual collector to look for fossils is not on the unstable cliffs or hazardous mudflows, but in the shallow rockpools at low tide, where specimens collect that have washed out of the soft, blue clays, in particular beautifully glossy ammonites preserved in iron pyrites or "fool's gold", and – if you're very lucky indeed – the blackened teeth, ribs, and vertebrae of Jurassic marine reptiles. But, as my eyes tuned in to a close scrutiny of the chaos of sand, gravel, rock and weed, I began to notice an abundance of bits of metal.

In fact, it seemed there was metal everywhere on that part of the beach. From large rusting plates, drums, and cylinders down to quite small components: mainly the sort of functional knobs and cleats that appear all over a ship. It seemed pretty obvious that some old shipwreck was washing up onto the beach, along with the ammonites and ichthyosaur bones. Having already gathered quite enough fossils over the years [1], my attention shifted to these remains of a different sort and antiquity. The eroded shapes and rusted colours were pleasing to the eye: it was easy to see how they might be incorporated into photo-collages, so I began looking for interesting bits of corroded metal instead.

The closer I looked, the more curious the nature of the deposit became. Things like ceramic spark plugs and heavy-duty door hinges and locks started to turn up, and even what looked like old bicycle components; cotter pins and Bowden-cable pulls and cogged gear-wheels. I was strongly reminded of my father in the late 1950s, naming the parts of a car engine or bicycle brake for me, as we visited a local breaker's yard in search of some elusive component or other. It was as if the rusting memory of an engineer had been spilled across the beach. It slowly became obvious that the source was not out to sea but higher up on the cliffs.

The cliffs at Lyme Regis and Charmouth are so productive as fossil sites because of the regular and occasionally catastrophic slumping that occurs when a hard layer of rock suddenly slides out over an underlying, waterlogged soft layer of clay. A few years ago we witnessed a relatively small cliff-fall – luckily from a safe distance – and it's an awe-inspiring sight. The famous landslip of 1839, resulting in the "Great Chasm" and the Undercliff between Lyme and Seaton, completely reconfigured miles of coastline, and there is a disturbing pattern of slips marching from Charmouth through Black Ven towards Lyme Regis. It turns out that a major slip in 2008 had exposed a local landfill site, dumping its contents – much of it dating back to Victorian times – across the beach, and blocking it for some years. What we are finding now is what the sea has taken away, played with for a bit, then returned in a slightly transfigured condition.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
Ariel's song, from The Tempest

It's sad to think that, in the future, most of what will be offered as playthings to the tides will not be Victorian ironwork, but plastic, and more plastic.

1. I was fortunate enough to find a glossy black plesiosaur tooth on an earlier visit to Lyme this year.