Lyme Regis

[tamaranth]

Tree
Originally uploaded by tamaranth

On Wednesday, craving fresh air and escape, I headed for Lyme Regis. (Note to self: Google Maps not always right. 3.5 hours to drive there; electing not to die of boredom on the A303, I looked at the road atlas, picked the 'obvious' route (M3), and cut the journey time by over half an hour.) Lyme Regis itself is ever so pretty (if hilly), and I had a late lunch on the beach in the sunshine.

Despite picking a windy Wednesday, the beach was quite busy with fossil-hunters and school groups, and it was hard to escape the arrhythmic clatter of geologists' hammers. Ammonites not as thick on the ground as I'd hoped: I didn't find anything spectacular. (See Flickr for the best of the rest.)

Fossil-hunting is all about pattern recognition: looking for the regular spiral of an ammonite, the symmetry of a sea urchin, the smooth bullet-shape of a belemnite. Lyme Regis beach is strewn, for some reason, with rusted machine parts. I find it much harder to look for specific patterns, or to filter out anything rust-coloured.

It was lovely, though, to walk on the beach and soak up sunshine and salt air. Good to stop arguing with myself and live in the moment.

Comments

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

I want to go to Lyme Regis. Great photos.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

Utter pedantry, of course, but if you were fossil-hunting you weren't, technically speaking, on Lyme Regis Beach -- you were on Black Ven, the bit of coast east from the water treatment plant and the Marine Theatre towards Charmouth.

Even more pedantically, Lyme Regis doesn't have a beach any more: what there was has disappeared beneath the huge ramp of shingle deposited along the front between the car park and the Cobb to prevent the sea from undercutting Marine Parade and the Old Cart Road. The only visible sand now left (*sob*) is the patch behind the harbour.

(From one who remembers Lyme from before there was a water treatment plant....from before the Cobb was extended....)

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

Just don't go there in the summer. It's overrun with tourists. (Or "grockles" as outsiders are known in the local language.)

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Want to go to where you can find mother-of-pearl ammonites some time over the summer?

[ajshepherd.livejournal.com]

Nice. Good that you had some sunshine, it makes a change!

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to go down for photos of rusted machine parts. [sigh]

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Lyme's wonderful, isn't it? Glad you had a good time there.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Sounds wonderful. We went a few years ago and I had to re-read "Persuasion" afterwards.