Lyme Regis & The Cobb

Stand where the town meets the water and the great grey arm of the Cobb curves out before you, holding the harbour in its embrace against the open Channel. Behind you the old streets tumble down to the sea; ahead, the dark cliffs run away east, packed with the bones of a lost world. This is Lyme Regis, the Pearl of Dorset, and you are standing at the very heart of the Jurassic Coast.

The Cobb is older than it looks. A breakwater has curved out from here since the thirteenth century, sheltering ships in a town that was once a serious medieval port, important enough to earn the royal "Regis" in its name. In Georgian times Lyme became a fashionable seaside resort, and its harbour wall slipped quietly into literature: Jane Austen set a pivotal scene on the Cobb in her novel "Persuasion", and much later John Fowles made it the stage for "The French Lieutenant's Woman", whose lone figure on the storm-swept wall became one of the most famous images in English fiction and film. But Lyme's deepest fame lies not in its stone wall but in its cliffs. Two hundred million years ago this was a warm, shallow sea, and the dark blue lias rock here, a layering of mudstone and limestone, is crammed with the creatures that lived and died in it.

Look first at the sweep of the Cobb itself, unrailed and open, curving to enclose the little harbour and its boats. Look second, out east, at those dark unstable cliffs, constantly crumbling and constantly shedding their treasures onto the beach below. Look third, on the shore after a storm, for the fossils themselves: the coiled spirals of ammonites, the bullet shapes of belemnites, sometimes far greater bones. Look fourth to the west, where the wild, jungle-like tangle of the Undercliff spreads over a vast old landslip, a green and secret reserve that the Coast Path threads on its way in. And look fifth at the town of Lyme, its museum standing on the very spot where its most extraordinary daughter was born.

That daughter was Mary Anning. Born in poverty in 1799, a working woman in an age that gave her neither wealth nor standing nor the vote, she learned to read these crumbling cliffs as no one had before. As a girl she and her brother prised out the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur, a great sea-dragon, from the rock. Later, working alone, she found the first plesiosaur, so strange that learned men doubted it could be real, and a flying pterosaur besides. Gentlemen scientists came to buy her finds and built their reputations upon them, while her own name was too often left off the papers. Yet it was Mary Anning, self-taught and dismissed, who did more than almost anyone to reveal that the Earth had a deep and startling past, and to found the young science of palaeontology upon these very shores.

A word of care. The cliffs here are genuinely unstable and can give way without warning, so never climb them and never linger at their base, and always keep an eye on the incoming tide. The Cobb is slippery and exposed, dangerous in rough seas, so walk it slowly and keep back from the edge. Treat this coast with respect and it will reward you.

From Lyme the Coast Path climbs east into the wild Undercliff and on towards Charmouth, Golden Cap and Seatown, deeper into the fossil country. Take a last look at the Cobb holding back the sea, and hunt the beach, if the tide allows, for an ammonite of your own. And whatever you find, spare a thought for Mary Anning, the poor girl of Lyme who read the rocks and found a world. Walk safe.