Sunday, May 24 – That famous tounge twister derived from a song released in 1908, but its origin story goes back almost another century. In the little town of Lyme Regis, a young girl named Mary Anning helped support her widowed mother by selling shells and fossils collected along the lime cliffs of Devon outside of town.
She found the first recorded full skeleton of an icthyrosaurus, a prehistoric sea creature believed to be an ancestor of a croccolide. The fossil was nearly 10 feet long. Mary went on to become a famous paleontologist and it all started because of the fossil-rich cliffsides just outside of town.
While Mary likely had the shores pretty much to herself in 1812, coming into Lyme Regis on the Sunday of a holiday weekend with record high temperatures.forecast meant for more crowded considitions. Our cottage is in Uplyme, a village up the hill from the coastal community and we took a leasurely 2-mile stroll along a river path to enter town before 10 am. The place was already bustling.
We walked along the Prominade, lined with pastel-painted sheds which people rent for the season and store their beach furniture and – on days like today – hide from the sun. We walked past the pebble beach and out onto the Cobb – the city Jetty that was featured in a scene with Meryl Streep from The French Lieutenant‘s Woman. Walking back to the beach, the sun was already blistering by 11 am, so we stopped in a local pub for a cool drink.
By the time we emerged, it felt like the crowd size had doubled. We headed up into town and stopped at the local Fossil Musuem. It had a wonderful paleontogy selection featuing the creatures found along the shores. It also had one floor dedicated to the town’s history. We learned that it was once a haven from a smuggling trade avoiding paying the King’s tarrifs. In 1644, during the English civil war, the town was friendly to the Parlimentarians and held off siege by Royalists for eight weeks. One hundred and twenty locals were killed, but the Royalists lost over 2,000 troops in their failed attempt to capture the city.
The area has been a popular vacation site since the mid 18th century and has seen many notable authors summer here. Among them: JRR Tolken, Alfred Lord Tennison, Jane Austin, John Gould, Beatrix Potter and Tracy Chevalier.
By noon, we were done with the heat and the throngs and ready to walk back to our cottage. About a quarter mile from our destination, we came to a cricket pitch that had been vacant earlier in the day. This time, the two sides were just breaking for tea.
We spent the rest of the afternoon staying in our cottage out of the sun. As the evening came, we went for a walk in the countryside near our cottage and decided to hunt for some Geocaches. There were two within a mile of our place. We found then both with only a few stings from nettles in some overgrown areas.
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