A Piece of Time

My sweep around the centre of Ely a couple of weeks ago finished (as the rain began to fall) with a very rapid visit to an antiques centre by the Great Ouse, curtailed by it closing, I thought a bit too sharply. On one of the upstairs stalls was a nice ammonite. I've wanted an ammonite for ages, and there are very few things I want. But then I realised that what I wanted wasn't just any old ammonite, but a Dorset ammonite, so I came away not with a fossil but a 19th-century print of the Ruins of Hierapolis. I'll have to find a place for that somewhere. 

I'm not quite sure when South Dorset became 'The Jurassic Coast': it wasn't 185 million years ago, because it wasn't that when I was a child and actually lived a few miles away. Perhaps it was 2001, the year when the area became a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its geology, features, and natural beauty; since then the tag has become crucial in the marketing of Dorset to tourists, and even the bus which runs along the sea road is known as the Jurassic Coaster. And the central and most charismatic icon of that whole identity is the coil of the ammonite.

The ammonite appears everywhere in south Dorset, decorating shops, hotels, brochures and bus stops. It's set into the ground outside Lyme Regis Museum, and on the town's lampposts. It even lends its name to a movie, as a symbol of the woman who has become herself a symbol, Mary Anning - again, in my childhood she was just a curiosity, but now, recast as a brilliant, misunderstood gay scientist in a peak bonnet with a basket full of fossils, she strangely binds in her own person past and present, and makes a landscape of cliffs and crashing seas hold contemporary imaginings. In her new statue at Lyme, only unveiled last year, she both holds an ammonite, and they decorate the hem of her skirts.

So I conceded that an ammonite would cost about £10 per inch of Jurassic stone, and went about the not-very-difficult task of sourcing one on Ebay. Here it is: it came not from the coast, but from Bradford Abbas, a long way inland but at the bottom of the same sea as (say) Burton Bradstock would have been 170 million years ago when the rock that held it was laid down. That doesn't matter. Its coil moves inward and pastward to the lost ages that have made the holy land of Dorset, and all of us. I disentangled it from its packaging, held it, and felt unexpectedly tearful.