Lyme Regis Beach
Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast is one of the most historically significant beach destinations in England, a small seaside town on the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site where the cliffs of the Charmouth Formation regularly produce one of the finest and most accessible fossil collecting opportunities in Britain. The town is famous as the home of Mary Anning, the self-taught nineteenth-century fossil hunter whose discoveries of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs made fundamental contributions to the founding science of palaeontology.
The fossils exposed by erosion of the Lower Jurassic cliffs include ammonites, belemnites, gryphaea oysters and occasional vertebrate remains, and the fossil hunters who work the beach at low tide after storms can find significant specimens without specialist knowledge.
The Cobb, the great curved harbour wall protecting the town from westerly swells, is one of the most famous pieces of harbour engineering on the English coast, its literary associations including Jane Austen's Persuasion and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman making it one of the most culturally resonant pieces of coastal infrastructure in Britain.