Maps & Background Information : Jurassic Coast

• Dorset
• Bournemouth
• Corfe Castle
• Isle of Purbeck
• Jurassic Coast

• Neolithic England
• Round & Long Barrows
• Salisbury
• Stonehenge
• The New Forest

More properly called the Dorset and East Devon Coastal World Heritage Site, the 95 mile (155 kilometres) stretch of English coast line between Old Harry Rocks in the east and Orcombe Point in the west was designated by UNESCO in December 2001.

Hail Mary! Watch as the young woman searches along the rocky shore. Expertly she selects a likely stone and carefully inspects it. Mary Anning, most famous of the 19th century fossilists, lived and worked in Lyme Regis all her life. The variety and arrangement of rocks and fossils along the Dorset and Devon coast was central to the development of the earth sciences in the 18th and 19th century as scientists tried to reconcile geological evidence with the biblical account of creation. The first representation of the prehistoric saurian world, produced by Sir Henry De la Beche, was called Duria Antiquior, Ancient Dorset.

Time and Tide! Over a period of 185 million years changes in the level of the land and sea formed the rocks of the Jurassic Coast. Periods of inundation and drying, erosion and deposition, created the variety of sedimentary deposits found along its length. The oldest, Triassic sandstones, are found in the west and date to 250 million years old. The youngest, Cretaceous chalks, date to 65 million years old and are found in the east. In between Jurassic limestones, shales and clays complete the continual geological record. These processes are, of course, still going on. The rise in the sea level since the last ice age has allowed the sea to erode the coast in to the variety of landforms that you see today, uncovering the geological record laid down in far more ancient times.