Sunday, June 16th
Jun 23rd, 2019 by rallyadmin
While we have a fine breakfast at Kate’s, we meet an English woman who is also staying at B&B. She lives in the south of France, in Provence, She’s about to meet the daughter and American son-in-law who live in the US but are looking for a house in the UK. We have an enjoyable conversation and the leave for Monmouth Beach in Lime Regis.
It’s not far through the back roads and soon we find a parking area. This time we have enough of coins for the parking ticket. Put in the car MOT number and the coins and the machine prints out a parking pass specific to the car that has to be displayed on the dashboard of the car. No passing this ticket to another car.
The only problem is that the parking area is at the top of a high hill over looking the beach and it’s a long way down. That will have to be climbed back up. Grrr. Oh well, we’re going to the beach. Down we go.
Monmouth Beach is a very popular vacation beach with a picturesque, small harbor. It’s overcast (again!) but not windy. There are actually some people swimming. Brrr.
But we’re not here to swim. We’re here to look for fossils. Monmouth Breach is one of the great public fossil beds anywhere in the world. The cliff above the beaches is shale with embed fossils of ammonites and the when the shale cliffs collapse (which they due regularly from erosion), the fossils are exposed and scattered on the rocky beaches below.
We walk down the beach scanning for the small fossils but, of course, we don’t find any. Hundreds of people do exactly the same thing every day so the odds of finding a fossil by just walking the beach is quite slim. We do find boulders with shadows of the fossils imprinted on them. I don’t know the process but there are many boulders with these images, most small images but a few have very large images.
Barbara suggests that it might be better to pick a spot nearer the cliffs and dig around in the smaller rocks. The odds of finding something that’s been missed might be better. I agree.
I pick a random spot and sit down. I move the larger stones and start digging down through the smaller stones. Eventually, I find s small stone, flat on one side but with a silhouette if a fossil on the other side. It’s definitely the image of an ammonite but not the animal itself.
It’s probably as close as I going to get to a true fossil without spending a lot more time and effort so I find B and the boys and we start heading back to the town. Barbara has found a couple of stones with some odd markings on them but we don’t really know what they are. We stop and talk with a man who is also digging on the beach, we show him the stone that I had found. He says that he hunts here often and he was impressed with the stone.
We walk along the beach back to the town. As we walk, Talyn sees another stone with an image very similarly to the one I found just lying on the beach. (The odds are probably still quite low but the odds are apparently greater than zero.) We leave with two very interesting stones.
We stop in a pub along the beach for lunch. Though we get a table the pub is crowded and very busy. But we eventually get our lunch and soon we’re on our way to the parking lot way up the dreaded hill. The climb is a bummer but we get on our way.
The plan had been to go back to Beer today to see the Chalk Caves but we spent so much time on the beach and at the pub waiting for lunch that we decide to call it a day and head back to Kate’s. It’s back to the same pub, The King’s Arms, for dinner and another fine single malt.
Tomorrow for St. Austell and the Eden Project.
Obi-wan
