Easter Break

Pretty much every year for the past forty years we have visited mid-Wales at Easter. However, this year – just for a change, and perhaps to prove that we are not entirely slaves to habit – we decided instead to go to Dorset, staying in the village of Morcombelake, which lies a mile or so inland from the coast between Bridport and Charmouth. Although I have to admit that we did stay in the very same cottage we have hired at Christmas for the past few years; well, there's no sense in going completely crazy, is there?

As I'm sure everyone realises, Easter is a so-called "moveable feast" calculated using a lunisolar calendar (in order to maintain the biblical link of the Crucifixion to Passover), so it can fall anywhere between the Spring Equinox and April 25th. Which is a spread of five weeks that encompass one of the more volatile times of year in the maritime climates of the North Atlantic, weather-wise. It can be a wild ride, with snow at one end of the week and hot sun at the other. As it happened, this year we experienced that springtime classic "sunshine and showers", but emphatically punctuated mid-week by the gale-force winds and torrential rain of Storm Noa as it blasted through the South West of England.

This mix of weather at Easter can make for good photography, of course. I have become a little over-reliant on the convenience the iPhone lately, and made a conscious decision to carry a "proper" camera this year. Although it's true that, in wet and windy weather down by a lively sea, to be able to pull a phone out of your pocket, grab a shot, and slip it quickly back in before getting it too wet or covered in salt spray is convenient, to say the least. So, there will be landscape photos to show, once I've begun processing them, but I thought I'd share something else first.

One of the main attractions of the Dorset coast is its geology. Exposed along a hundred-mile length of coastline is a continuous sequence of Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous rocks, some of which are highly "fossiliferous", not least the constantly-eroding cliffs of Lyme Regis and Charmouth, which can still yield the spectacular plesiosaur and ichthyosaur remains made famous by Mary Anning in the 19th century. The entire length was made a World Heritage Site in 2001, and given the rather opportunistic name of the Jurassic Coast [1]. If, like me, you were something of a natural history enthusiast in your youth, given to rummaging through nature's ancient leftovers in search of treasure, then fossil hunting along the beaches of Dorset is a quick route into The Zone, that pleasant mental state of singular concentration also known as a "flow state", where all troublesome and distracting thoughts and worries melt into the background, and the most important thing, if only for a brief hour or two, can become the square yard of gravelly sand and grey rock in front of your eyes.

The beach at such places is in a constant state of flux. On my first visit to Lyme Regis in the 1980s the "ammonite pavement" at Monmouth Cliff was fully visible, along with a rubble of boulders containing large embedded specimens a foot or more in diameter. Somewhere I've got some contact sheets of the photographs I took back then with my first SLR, an Olympus OM-1N. Currently, though, storms have piled sand and gravel over the exposure, and the boulders have either been buried or washed out to sea. In fact, Lyme in recent times has not been a great place for fossil hunting.

However, foraging along the more promising beach at Seatown, I was intrigued by the harder layer underlying the cliff exposure known as the Belemnite Marl, which seemed to be more visible than on our previous visit at Christmas. This rock is packed with the internal skeletons of an extinct form of squid which resemble bullets or six-inch nails, rather like the cuttlefish "bones" that wash up on the beach today. Belemnite fossils are very common on Dorset beaches, but mainly found as sea-worn and broken pieces. Seen whole and in situ, they are much more attractive, but best left where they are. Naturally, I photographed them, along with the rivulets of mudflow trickling out from the cliff, and all the other shapes and patterns that attract the eye on a wet rocky beach.

It was only later, when looking more closely at these belemnite photographs, that I noticed the presence of another kind of fossil: the rock was full of tiny five-pointed stars, making the belemnites look like a child's drawing of a fleet of rocket-ships against a starry sky. These stars are segments of the stem and arms of a crinoid, or "sea lily", a strange creature from that bizarre group of survivors known as the echinoderms, which includes starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers, most of which share a unique five-fold (pentaradial) symmetry. Like belemnites, crinoid fossils are common on the beach, but mainly found as broken segments like these, usually still joined together like short lengths of a broken bead necklace. 

However, of all the small finds, ammonites are always the prize: there's something very satisfying about their knobbly "ram's horn" spiral, especially when they have been preserved in iron pyrites (a.k.a. "fool's gold") as they often are when found on the beach, washed out of the Jurassic clays. Even when they're as tiny as this one:

1. The film Jurassic Park was released in 1993, and enthralled an entire generation of dinosaur-mad kids, my own son included.