Foraging the Seashore

One from the archives! This is a piece I wrote and illustrated for Dorset Life magazine about my love for the Jurassic Coast and the edible food you can forage along the shore. Seaweed is a great food to forage all year round, as most edible species aren’t as dependent on the changing seasons as their above-land counterparts. Most seaweed is also rich in iron, which is a great health boost for the darker months.

Note: Although I have written about Dorset in this piece, all of these species are widely-found across most British shores and many northern European ones.

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It’s a rare thing to be able to watch the past unfolding in front of your eyes, but that’s what happens every time I visit the salty shores of Lyme Regis. Sunlight pours over chip shops and cobbled streets as the sea washes slabs of limestone and dark, soft shale, causing the towering cliffs to crumble, one piece at a time, back into the ocean. To come here is to gaze in wonder at layers of ancient life immortalised in sediment and rock, calcified ammonites, crinoids, marine reptiles and dinosaur remains dating back almost 200 million years. Every fallen rock reveals a new slice of the past, exposing another fossilised creature frozen in time, who last felt the warmth of sunshine when the dinosaurs walked the earth. How many more fossils are buried within these cliffs? How many people have walked these beaches and found them - not just archaeologists, but our own human ancestors who evolved just six million years ago?