Lyme Regis to Seatown

We were spirited to the seafront in Lyme in Che’s ex-Britgas blue van, and had breakfast. It’s good doing that and then running on carbs and fat all day. It keeps you in shape.

This lad played in goal for the Blades. He was in the 1902 FA Cup winning team. He once ate 11 breakfasts, which were served out and intended for the whole team, when the others were out just finishing off training. Didn’t do him any harm.

He also got brassed off in a Sheffield Derby when Wednesday fans were giving him some stick. He broke the cross bar of the goal he was keeping and then waded into the pig fans. He laid some of them out. Hero! William ‘Fatty’ Foulke.

We set off after our decent breakfast and made it down to the coast where there was a statue of the great Fossilologist, Mary Anning. She was born in the 1700s and was a star of the fossil world.

We were hooked. The tide was favourable (going out) and we dropped down to the seashore. There were quite a few people who were obviously experienced fossil hunters, and whilst we were only mere trekkers we got an itch. There was an ammonite print on this rock. That did us.

Where do we find fossils? We asked one old dear and she told us to look for iron pyrite. We didn’t know what it was or what it looked like but we gave it a go.

Then after finding bugger all we asked another woman, who explained where we needed to look, what it looked like, how old it was and what it was. Brilliant! She also gave us some fossils that she’d found. Bloody hell. We’re going to get rich!

We worked our way down the shingle. Still not knowing what iron pyrite looked like.

So we went back to the old lass who had given us the fossils, and she showed us what an iron pyrite environment looked like. We were really hooked now!

We spent a few hours working through iron pyrite areas, with great success! Hooray!!!

Ammonites and Belemnites. We’re loaded!

Time passed us by. Our target of West Bay went out of the window, and we revised our terminus to Seatown. Reluctantly we carried on and passed by Charmouth. Needing to make more time, so that we could climb Golden Cap before dark, we set off along the beach/shingle again.

It was a rugged ride along the shoreline and we knew that we were running out of opportunities to get up the cliffs before the tide cut us off. Luckily I was carrying an ancient copy of the Exmouth to Poole book of the SW Coast Path series. An extract of the Ordnance Survey map indicated we might be able to get up this gully and on to the Coast Path up Golden Cap, the highest point on the south coast of England.

We were lucky. We found a rope dangling down the gully and were able to pull ourselves up on it. The problem is at the top, where the gorse is too thick to push your way through, and too spiky. But we found an old path leading away from the top of the rope, which was difficult to negotiate as you need to crawl through vegetation tunnels on occasions. It obviously hadn’t been used for a long time, and eventually we arrived at a wooden stile which told folk coming the other way that the path had been closed permanently for safety reasons. We made it.

After half an hour climbing we made it up Golden Cap. Great views backward…..

And forward. And nestling in the bottom of the next valley was Seatown.

Che picked us up, together with our fossil haul.

Great day.

Night night.