The Jurassic Coast
Walk 95 miles of English coastline and you travel through 185 million years of Earth's story, from desert dunes to Cretaceous seabeds, in a single afternoon's stroll per epoch.
Published
Quick Facts
- Location
- South coast of England, from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset
- Length
- About 95 miles (153 km)
- World Heritage status
- Inscribed by UNESCO in December 2001, England's first natural World Heritage Site
- Time span
- Roughly 185 million years, covering the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods
- Famous landmarks
- Durdle Door, Lulworth Cove, Chesil Beach, Old Harry Rocks, Charmouth, Lyme Regis
- Famous fossil hunter
- Mary Anning of Lyme Regis (1799–1847)
- Visitor numbers
- Often cited at around 7 million visits a year in the 2010s
- Best known for
- Ammonites, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and some of the world's most studied rock layers
A time machine you can walk along
The trick of the Jurassic Coast is that the rocks are tilted. Over millions of years, earth movements lifted and tipped the layers so that they slope gently eastwards. The result is that as you walk from west to east, you move forward in time. At Exmouth in Devon, the red cliffs are from the Triassic, around 250 million years ago, when this land was baking desert. Move on to Lyme Regis and the grey, fossil-rich Jurassic shales and limestones appear. By Studland Bay in Dorset, the chalk of the Cretaceous is waiting, the remains of a warm sea full of microscopic life. The coast exposes an exceptionally extensive, almost continuous sequence of Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks, a key reason for its UNESCO inscription in 2001. It is why geology students come here as if on pilgrimage.
The carpenter's daughter who rewrote prehistory
No one is more tied to this coast than Mary Anning. Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, she grew up in a family that sold fossils to tourists, and she was working the shore as a child. In her early teens she and her brother Joseph uncovered the skeleton of an ichthyosaur, an extraordinary marine reptile. She later found the first complete plesiosaur skeleton, in 1823, and the first British pterosaur skeleton. She was not allowed to join the Geological Society of London because she was a woman, and her finds were often credited to wealthy gentlemen. Today she is celebrated as one of the most important fossil collectors in history. Lyme Regis still has fossil shops and a museum standing on the site of her family home.
Cliffs that fall, and why that is good news
The Jurassic Coast is not a fixed monument. It is eroding all the time, and that is exactly why fossils keep appearing. Storms, rain and the sea strip off the cliff face and expose new material, especially around Charmouth and Lyme Regis. The flip side is real danger. Landslips and rockfalls are common, and the soft clay cliffs can collapse with little warning. In 2008 a huge landslip at Black Ven near Lyme Regis, a famously unstable stretch, was one of many reminders that this coast is on the move. Stay away from the foot of the cliffs and keep to signed paths. The golden rule among collectors is to look on the beach, not in the cliff. Fossil hunting on the loose shingle after a storm is the best bet.
Postcard icons: Durdle Door, Lulworth and Chesil
Durdle Door is the coast's showpiece, a limestone arch that stands off the Dorset shore. The sea carved it by exploiting weaker rock behind a harder band of Portland limestone. Just along the path, Lulworth Cove is almost a perfect circle, made when the sea broke through the hard outer rock and then rapidly scooped out the softer clays behind. At Lulworth's Fossil Forest, you can see the fossilised remains of ancient trees and algal mats from the Jurassic, when this was a coastal lagoon. Further west, Chesil Beach runs for about 18 miles as a great bank of pebbles linked to the Isle of Portland. The pebbles grade in size from small at the western end to large at the eastern end, so legend has it that smugglers could tell where they had landed in the dark just by the feel of the stones. It is a good story, though no one can prove it.
Myth versus reality: it's not all dinosaurs
The name is a bit misleading. Only part of the coast is Jurassic, and dinosaur bones are actually rare here. The star finds are marine creatures: ammonites, belemnites, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, which were not dinosaurs at all. Those swirling ammonites are everywhere, so much so that they inspired the name of Ammonite-themed shops and town symbols along the coast. Look for them in the stone walls of Lyme Regis and in the beach pebbles. For dinosaur fans, the Purbeck area also has footprints from the early Cretaceous, when great plant-eaters and predators crossed the muddy shores. The best way to enjoy it is to take it slowly: walk a stretch, stop at a viewpoint like Old Harry Rocks, the chalk stacks at the eastern end, and imagine the world each layer once belonged to.
Notable people
- Mary Anning
- Joseph Anning
- Henry De la Beche
- William Buckland
Test yourself
Play the UK quizMore to see nearby
Dartmoor
Published
A moor where Bronze Age farmers fenced their fields 3,500 years ago, a prison gave Sherlock Holmes his setting, and tin and granite built a good part of Britain.