Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside

Phew. What a lovely summer basking in the sun on a sandy beach with clear turquoise sea as flat as a mill pond -and we are in England!!! If the weather was always as good as we have had it for the last few weeks, who would want to go abroad? As I write this at the end of a fantastic three weeks in Dorset I can only marvel at the wonderful adventure we have had. A visit to The Eden Project in Cornwall, a visit to the Royal Signals Base in Blandford (not my choice) a short cruise along the Jurassic Coast learning about the World Heritage Site with it's 250 million year old rock face and best of all going on a fossil hunt with about 50 other excited children - and adults - including us - to learn about the fossils that can be found on the beach at Charmouth, where we were staying, and being allowed to collect them and take them home! The picture at the top is a stencil of an actual fossil called an ammonite and they are millions of years old. Before we went on the guided fossil hunt I thought it was looking for a needle in a hay stack, bearing in mind the number of stones scattered under the Jurassic cliffs, and so I persuaded hubby to buy me a real ammonite fossil from the fossil shop. It was not the biggest in the shop as some where many hundreds of pounds, but it was about 7inches high and was a dream come true as I am an avid collector of all things ancient - after all I love my hubby! But, low and behold we found an ordinary looking stone on the beach, with tell tale crystal like lumps at the side we were told to look out for, and after calling to our guide, who gently hit the stone with a hammer, a baby ammonite was exposed- a creature entombed in it's hiding place and not seen for millions of years. That tiny fossil meant more to us than the bigger one bought in the shop because we had found it. To hold something that ancient puts into perspective what the world is all about and how small a part we humans play in the grand scheme of things.

From star dust we came and to star dust we will return - just like my ammonites.

Carol Nicholas-Letch