My Lifelong Obsession with Fossils, Lyme Regis, and the Ghost of Mary Anning

Some obsessions begin not with a bang, but with a whisper. Mine started with a forgotten story – half-remembered, like the jagged edge of a fossil peeking from a cliff face. A girl and her dog, scouring the beach for ancient relics. I don’t remember where I read it. Maybe it was part of an anthology. I vaguely recall it being paired with the story of another girl, one who miraculously survived a plane crash. But it was the fossil hunter who lodged herself into my bones.

Mary Anning. Long before I knew her name, I knew her story. And even when I lost the book that told it to me, I never lost her. She stayed with me. This fierce young woman in a man’s world, pulling secrets from the earth, ammonite after ammonite, ichthyosaur skull after shattered jaw. It ignited something in me. A lifelong obsession, you could call it. Or maybe a calling.

From childhood on, fossils fascinated me. I scoured gravel driveways, garden paths, schoolyard corners. Every stone had potential. Every beach holiday included some hope – unfulfilled – of uncovering a curled shell locked in time. But always, at the heart of it all, was Lyme Regis.

It became the stuff of legend to me. I’d see it in documentaries, read about it in fossil guidebooks, picture the sweeping cliffs and layered beaches. I didn’t just want to visit – it was bucket list stuff. Sacred ground. A place where the veil between history and now felt thin.

And this year… I made it.

I walked where Mary walked. I gazed at the same golden cliffs that whispered to her of prehistoric giants. And I did it with Simon at my side, which made it all the more special.

The day had been warmer than it had any right to be, for the time of year. One of those unseasonably warm spring evenings that makes everything feel slightly surreal. The kind of warmth that clings to your skin and makes the sea look less hostile, more like a mirror to the past.

We parked what felt like miles away and walked the long path to the promenade. Every step buzzed with anticipation. And then, as we rounded the bend, I saw her.

The statue.

Mary Anning in bronze, eternal. Her dog bounding by her heels, holding her ammonite like a relic or a talisman, gazing solemnly out toward the very landslip that took her dog’s life and nearly took hers. That detail broke something in me. I’ve always loved dogs – anyone who’s seen me around animals knows it – and knowing that little piece of her story, that she lost her beloved companion to the earth she so loved, felt like something only a fellow dog-lover would carry forever.

I cried. Of course I did.There’s a kind of grief and reverence in seeing someone you’ve revered your whole life immortalised like that. Not in a grand, pompous way, but as if she had just paused there for a moment in her eternal hunt.

We bought fish and chips from a little chippy we weren’t expecting to find open – one of those lovely seaside surprises. Hot, vinegary, perfect. We ate on the seafront wall, watching the lights of ships glint out on the black sea. Everything tasted sharper, better, more alive.

And I still haven’t found an ammonite.

Not one I’ve discovered with my own hands, anyway. But that just means I have to go back again. And I will. Maybe a hundred times, if that’s what it takes. Because this obsession isn’t a phase – it’s woven into me like the spirals in the fossils I hunt.

Some of us are born knowing that bones and stories and time all intermingle underfoot. And some of us spend our lives chasing the women who showed us how to listen.

Thank you, Mary. I’ll see you again soon.