Another bucket list location ticked off, Lyme Regis on the stunning Jurassic Coast. It’s where the rugged cliff tops and coastlines of West Dorset and East Devon meet. Bucolic Thomas Hardy countryside with ancient castles, medieval churches, impossibly cute villages and gorgeous seaside towns. Perhaps none more beautiful than Lyme Regis, the so called ‘Pearl of Dorset’, the quintessential bucket and spade sea side town with a rich and fascinating history. 

Lyme Regis received its first Royal Charter from King Edward I in 1284 to become ‘Regis’, or ‘of the King’, and an extremely fashionable seaside resort in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

It’s where John Fowles wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman in the 1960s. But perhaps the most famous of all its residents was Mary Anning, a pioneering palaeontologist and fossil collector who lived in Lyme Regis in the early 19^th Century.

For this is the Jurassic Coast, the only place on Earth where rocks from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods can be seen in one place, representing 185 million years of Earth’s history. Between 1811 and 1812, at just 12 years old, Anning discovered the first Ichthyosaur and, at the age of 24 years old, discovered the first complete skeleton of a Plesiosaur. Mary would search the local beaches and cliffsides, particularly in the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils, considerably contributing to changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life on Earth.

Today, you’ll find perhaps hundreds of people scouring the same cliffsides and beaches in search for the elusive fossil, perhaps none more emblematic to Lyme Regis than the Ammonite.