Time Travel

The Sedimentary rocks we find here at Charmouth are a record of the past. Each layer was formed over many thousands of years and contains clues that tell us about the changing environments and vanished creatures of those ancient worlds.

At Charmouth the layers of mud rock and limestone tell us that this area was once a calm warm sea, probably about 300m deep. The fossils of marine life within the rocks allow us to imagine that sea filled with fierce, giant marine reptiles, swarms of ammonites big and small, Groups of belemnites darting like bullets through the murky water and shoals of weird armour plated fish. The cliff face is a door to another time. But the story does not end or even begin here in our cliffs.

Charmouth is a small part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. The Jurassic Coast runs for 95 miles between Exmouth in Devon and Studland in Dorset. This enormous stretch of coast tells the story of 185 million years worth of geological time.

Between the Triassic , 250 million years ago, to the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, there was an almost continuous build up of sedimentary rocks across southern England. These layers were tilted by earth movements some time later and then uplifted. Subsequent erosion has formed a modern coastline that cuts through all those layers exposing the entire record at beach level. The oldest rocks are in the west and as you walk eastwards the layers in the cliff get younger and younger allowing you to ‘walk through time’.

The Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods make up the Mesozoic Era or the ‘middle ages’ of life on Earth. The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site is the only place in the world where the changes in life throughout the Mesozoic are recorded in a continuous story.