History Set In Stone

A new film shines the spotlight on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, one of Britain’s most captivating coastlines

- Natasha Foges

An impoverished fossil-hunter born in Lyme Regis, Dorset, in 1799, Mary Anning has long been a footnote in the history books, but a new film, Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet, is set to change all that.

Mary’s father died when she was just a child, and she spent her days wandering the coast around her home town, collecting the area’s abundant fossils to sell for the family’s upkeep. This rugged stretch of southwest England is now known as the Jurassic Coast, thanks to extraordinary evidence of 185 million years of history imprinted into its rocky shores.

Mary’s efforts reaped rewards. Aged 12, she unearthed the 16ft fossil of a sea monster belonging to the genus now known as Ichthysaurus, followed by other startling finds. The theory of extinction was a new idea, and Mary’s finds were instrumental in proving that some species simply die out. At the time, though, women were not allowed to join scientific societies and although she shared her groundbreaking discoveries with the luminaries of the day, as a woman – and a poor one at that – the pioneering palaeontologist was not given the credit she deserved.

Mary Anning’s birthplace (and her family’s fossil shop) is a good place to begin your tour of the Jurassic Coast. Now the Lyme Regis Museum, it tells Mary’s incredible life story and, naturally, has a world-class fossil collection.

The little town itself is full of atmosphere. Jane Austen visited twice and was so taken with the place that it appeared in her last novel, Persuasion. She describes “the principal street almost hurrying into the water, the Walk to the Cobb, skirting round the pleasant little bay, which, in the season, is animated with bathing machines and company...” Bathing machines aside, the scene is much the same these days, and the town has lost none of its Regency charm.