One goes mad in Dorset.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I was absent from Livejournal for the entirety of last week. This was because I’d noticed that the last time I had a full week off work was in April 2008 and so, reasoning that it was about time I had a break, I took myself off to this dandy pad just outside Dorchester:


It’s a pretty cool experience to hire a castle for ones’ exclusive use, and I’d recommend it. It’s like a 15th century pimp crib to which you can take your supple honeyz after whooping it up in the fleshpots of Weymouth and, despite an article I found in The Guardian* saying that it was haunted, I enjoyed myself immensely. As a result I’ve been offline as they don’t have the internet in Dorset yet. In fact, there are parts of the country where they still regard the steam engine as dangerously modern and potentially subversive.
I hadn’t been to Dorchester before except in passing, but it turned out to be a lovely town. Founded by the Romans as Durnovaria shortly after the Emperor Vespasian had arrived and shown the locals the delights of Roman civilization by massacring them, Dorchester is simply crammed with the better part of two millennia of history and, it turns out, like many places with more history than sense they have sometimes been slightly cavalier with their heritage. My favourite passage from the guidebook I picked up read The Roman baths were first discovered and excavated in 1978 before being carefully covered with a car park.

I’m just glad that they thought about it, and weren’t overly careless.

For the most part, though, Dorchester has been laudably sensible with its history. I spent a few days looking at the town, being impressed by the sensitively displayed remnants of the house of a wealthy Roman (complete with well-preserved mosaics), and then going around the excellent Dorset and Devon Regimental Military Museum, where I learned that the locals had spent the last few centuries going round and round the world shooting at pretty much everyone they met, the local history society museum (genuinely good. Indeed, I was surprised by just how good a local society can be), and the Dorchester Dinosaur Museum, where the unsmiling cashier took the best part of a tenner off me in order to let me wander around three rooms with few enough fossils but plenty of paper-mache models of dinosaurs.
This last one disappointed me. Dorset and Devon are globally famous for their fossils and dinosaurs – in fact they hold the UK’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site for that very reason – and so after that disappointment I set out to learn more and hopped on the bus to Lyme Regis because it was there, a little over two centuries ago, that the modern science of Paleontology actually began.

As a birthplace of a scientific discipline, Lyme Regis is at first glance a heck of an unlikely place. A seaside town of the sort which once did well out of tourism but now makes its living by selling nicknacks, curios, cream teas and second-hand books to busloads of daytrippers, it’s an odd mix of the extremely interesting and the incredibly prosaic. On the day that I was there the exhibition at the local museum was – I’m not making this up – “Sheds of Lyme”, a history of “Sheds of Lyme” illustrated with hundreds of pictures of “Sheds of Lyme”. On the other hand it has two major sites of interest, and I planned to see them both.
Firstly, there’s what’s known as The Cobb, the immense Victorian breakwater which stands out into the harbour and was the setting for Meryl Streep getting generally wet and miserable in The French Lieutenants’ Woman. It’s an impressive feat of engineering and I recreated the scene from the film by walking along it in the driving rain and wind getting generally wet and miserable.
Right at the end I met a couple who were staring out to sea with the aid of tripod-mounted telescopes, so naturally I asked what they were looking for.
“We’re ship-spotting”, one replied.
I peered into the thick drizzle and mist which hung just offshore, limiting vision to perhaps two hundred yards.
“You’re yanking my chain”, I replied.

Merriment aside the thing I was most interested in was the coastline, because Lyme Regis nestles in a valley which is slap in the middle of one of the most unusual stretches of coastline on Earth. A Mecca for fossil-hunters and paleontologists, it is locally known as ‘The Jurassic Coast’. The cliffs on each side of the town stretch for a hundred miles and represent the remnants of some ancient geological cataclysm which reared a huge slice of strata out of the ground and exposed them to the elements; in a hundred miles it is possible to walk along rocks which stretch from 260 to 95 million years old in a gigantic wave of frozen time from the Cambrian, Permian and Jurassic eras of life - and these cliffs and rocks are simply crammed with fossils in numbers uncountable.
People have been finding fossil bones and ammonites for a long time and come up with a variety of interesting explanations** for them, but Paleontology really got going one day in 1804 when a local collector by the name of Mary Anning found the first complete skeleton of a prehistoric creature known to science. It was an Ichthyosaur, and if you go to the natural history museum you can still see it.
Her discovery caused quite a stir; the famous French naturalist, George Cuvier, flat refused to believe that a mere woman could have discovered a new species until he was actually shown the fossil, at which point history relates that his head span round and round until it burst as a result of his paradigm shifting.

Everything you read about the rocks around Lyme indicates that all you have to do is stroll along them to find fossils and I rather wanted to follow in Mary Annings’ footsteps. Possibly I could discover a new species and name it after myself; Tyrannosaurus Davidensis has quite a ring to it, even if it’s only a new kind of whelk. The thing was, it was quickly clear that a lot of other people have had the same idea. As you walk along, it’s rare you see any of the pebbles and good-sized stones which someone hasn’t obviously given a good whack with a hammer in the hope that the skull of something large and carnivorous might be revealed and so you lower your expectations. You look for little fossils, perhaps the size of a twenty pence piece. The familiar sworl of an Ammonite, perhaps, or a sliver which might be a tooth or a fragment of bone. I clambered along the beach, glancing into nooks between rocks and poking the ferrule of my brolly in between stones on the offchance a bit of Stegosaurus might be nestling there, and didn’t find a thing.
What it takes you a while to realize, you see, is that the reason you aren’t seeing any fossils is because you are actually looking for them in the wrong way. As you nose and prod and poke there comes a moment when you look down at your feet and suddenly twig what it is you’re actually standing on.

It’s remarkable. It’s like someone has spread a fossil-pattern carpet over the rocks and you didn’t notice it because you were too busy looking at the dust. The moment your eyes become attuned you look around and realize that they’re everywhere. An entire seabed of incredible antiquity stretches in front of you covered in Ammonites and mussels and razor shells and more. I have, quite frankly, never seen anything like it in my entire life. I stood and wandered for several minutes in silent, delighted, awe.
“Well, bless me”, I said, or words to that effect.
And the best thing was, thanks to it being December and a bit chilly, I had the place entirely to myself. My own piece of history. More time than it’s possible to comprehend was right there, dotted over the rocks at my feet. I could have danced. I might even have done so had the rocks not been wet and more than a little slippery. I wanted to go and grab the people huddled over their telescopes or in the teashops in the town and say “Have you seen this? It’s incredible!”, because it is.

I wandered in admiration over the rocks for over an hour and then I looked at the sky and contemplated something. If you stood on those rocks and looked at the stars, then at the time when the stones beneath your feet were swimming and breathing and squelching and doing other, generally cephalopoddy things, the dim light hitting your eyes from that fuzzy patch in the constellation of Perseus, the Perseus Cluster of galaxies, a quarter of a billion light years away, was just setting off.
And it that’s not a sobering though, I don’t know what is.

And with that, I turned around and went back up the beach to the pub. There’s only so many millions of years of history I can contemplate without working up quite a thirst.


^{*Like pretty much everything else in The Guardian, this turned out to be an outright lie.
**Usually along the lines of “Bones of dragons”.}