AMMONITES & LUCY

It had only been one month but Lucy arranged a weekend away. They drove from London to Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast. Lucy told Andrew about the Jurassic period, that this was fossil country, the home of Mary Anning, the village’s most famous resident and a prolific collector and paleontologist in the 1800s. Later Lucy and Andrew retraced her steps, heading east to Charmouth along the beach. Andrew, keen to impress his new girlfriend, searched frantically for fossils but it was Lucy who gently turned a stone with her foot to reveal a large ammonite. This was the first of their ‘stone museum’. They have a single stone from all of their travels, they mark it with the date and place where they found it. A few years later they returned to Lyme Regis with their baby son, Franklin. He was only recently out of hospital, the beginning of his life had been hard. This was their first family holiday. They set off down the beach, it was December 30th 2010 – as marked on the tiny ammonite that Lucy found that day.

20 May 2012