Day 13 in England: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning

 

Low tide waits for no one, and so three of us were up at the crack of dawn this morning to drive over to Lyme Regis and spend a couple more hours in the footsteps of Mary Anning.

Here's our complete itinerary for the day:

• fossil hunting in Lyme Regis
• back to Beer for breakfast and picking up the sleepyhead
• back to Lyme Regis again for sightseeing
• drive back to Gatwick Airport, stopping at a convenient local chain store along the way for souvenirs
• drop off the rental car, check into our airport hotel, and try to fit a hundred pounds of rocks and fossils into four carry-ons and four personal items!

Who knows how on earth we would have gotten all our rocks and fossils home if we'd been as successful at fossil hunting as I am in my dreams!

We parked by Monmouth Beach, then hustled west, where we puttered on the shore, fossil hunting and admiring the Ammonite Pavement:

We found a few pretty treasures of our own!

The best part, though, was imagining myself in the footsteps of Mary Anning. This stretch of coast was her backyard, and although she ranged widely both east and west, this was her home ground:

I'm sure I'm grubbing in the wet sand just like she did, only she was wearing massive wool skirts and I'm wearing a filthy pair of joggers:

Eventually, we had to make the long walk down the beach back to our car (funny how the walk is always SO much longer on the way back!) so we could go back to Beer and fetch our teenager before checkout.

I did wash my hands before I sat down for my last full English breakfast of the trip, but I didn't change out of my muddy clothes. Gotta stay true to myself no matter where I am!

In our early morning trip to Lyme Regis, we'd encountered little traffic and just a couple of dog walkers and joggers. By mid-morning, however, Bank Holiday Monday/Mid-Term Break was in full swing omg! Matt was a tentative but extremely careful driver during this whole week, and it was funny/terrifying to encounter so many absolutely terrible drivers on these, the narrowest roads outside of Dartmoor--honestly, I think some were even narrower than in Dartmoor! We missed by centimeters being collided into by a car that turned into us around a blind corner, and half the cars we saw (including ours, ahem) spent half the time driving half onto the sidewalk. And that was even with us parking in a pay lot at the edge of town--the traffic we saw in the middle of town was absolutely bonkers!

British friends, WHAT ON EARTH.

Nevertheless, I made it to my ultimate destination, the pinnacle of this trip: 

I was so lucky, because this museum is closed on Mondays. The only exception?

School breaks!

So me and all the rowdy school kids and all their parents happily crowded inside on this Half-Term Monday, and I could achieve my dream of worshipping at the feet of Mary Anning, on the spot where she once lived and worked and kept her fossils.

The Lyme Regis Museum is built on the site of Mary Anning's former house, which was torn down in 1889. The only known depiction of what her house looked like is this drawing--

--which the museum turned into this model:

I love those picture windows. I imagine them all full of fossils!

The museum has a wonderful mix of exhibits. It has fossils collected (or likely collected) by Mary Anning--

I have explained to Matt numerous times that I am in desperate need of a giant LEGO ichthyosaur of my own, and yet what did I get for my birthday? Well, actually I got an absolutely awesome DIY model kit of Stonehenge and I'm thrilled with it... but I also still really want a giant LEGO ichthyosaur!

This fossil is a shark skull, the first of its kind and used as the holotype of the species. Mary Anning discovered it, collected it, and prepared it... so obviously it's named Hybodus bechei after Henry De la Beche.

This complete ichthyosaur fossil is on loan here while the Lyme Regis Museum crowdfunds the money to purchase it.

--items from the period in which she lived--

Look at all those pipes! I mudlarked so many of their stems on the Thames!

--and tons of other fossils collected in this area and donated by local fossil hunters. 

The gift shop was great, too. Here's me having an emotional reaction to JURASSIC CREATURE STUFFIES!!!

I'm supposed to stop buying "family stuffies" so I did not bring any home, but I intend to revisit this ridiculous rule soon. The only stuffies that I so far own and insist on exhibiting in the family space are 1) an Edmontosaurus annectens, 2) a whale shark, 3) the exact same mermaid sequin dinosaur that the SpaceX Crew Dragon took into orbit as their "gravity indicator," and 4) Captain Ameribear, a Build a Bear that I liberated from a friend as we were setting up for a group garage sale. That is NOT too many family stuffies, you guys!

One of the exhibit labels in the Lyme Regis Museum mentioned that Mary Anning was buried at St. Michael's Church, "just a few hundred meters from the museum." So guess what I Googled next?

That's two of my most favorite heroines who have died of breast cancer, if you're keeping count.

St. Michael's Church, like Mary Anning's former house, has its back to the sea, and below the church there's actually a paved path that follows the coast and passes over the spot where she made one of her best discoveries. 

If you walk down the path to the end, you'll find Mary, herself, ammonite in hand, Tray at her feet, walking with purpose towards eternity:

Yes, I made Matt take a photo of me walking arm in arm with her, chatting like the best friends we are. I have a very vivid and active internal life!

My meeting with Mary was the culmination and final wish on my list for this trip, so we meandered slowly back to our car up the narrow streets of Lyme Regis, browsing in every rocks and fossil shop we saw along the way. We braved the last of the narrow roads, and Matt handled the A303 like a man who'd been driving here his whole life and knew every single rule for roundabouts:

On the outskirts of London, I found a shopping area that said it had a Sainsbury's, so we detoured over for Cadbury and crisps to take back home, and we had a lovely surprise! The teenager had discovered, too late in the London leg of our trip, a discount bookstore chain that she wanted to visit. This was our second to last day in the city, though, and there was not a location anywhere near us--but, alas, the day before, when we'd taken that long bus trip out to Pax Lodge, we'd seen one from the bus window but didn't know what it was! ARGH!

I felt terrible about it, because it was, like, literally one of two entire things the kid expressed genuine interest in during the entire trip, so omg I was beyond ecstatic when it turned out that this shopping area had The Works bookstore! 

Bonus: it also had a Sainsbury's AND a Poundland! All our cheap souvenirs in one convenient trip!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

Day 11 in England: To Avalon with King Arthur

 

With the whole of Le Morte d'Arthur under our belts, the teenager and I were especially excited for our day at Glastonbury, also known as Avalon, burial site of Arthurus, Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus. 

But first a Full English, then a bit of time exploring THE most epic creation in all of England:

Mini Stonehenge!

Here's our full day:

• Glastonbury Abbey
• Glastonbury Tor
• window shopping in Glastonbury
• drive the long drive to Devon

We needed emergency crisps and biscuits and Cadbury bars for our long afternoon drive later, so we stopped by a Tesco Express on our way out of Salisbury and the college student found that our favorite biscuit, Jaffa Cakes (or are they a cake? I feel like England has a Whole Thing about biscuits vs. cakes), also sells something called a Jonut. And it. Is. Delicious!

I am currently very sad that my mouth is not full of Jonuts, Cadbury with Popping Jellies, and scones with clotted cream.

With Matt's three full days of driving experience by this time, we didn't actually do too badly in the narrow streets of Glastonbury, especially considering that window shopping along High St. later, we would see SO many near-accidents and drivers screaming at each other. 

Fortunately, we were able to avoid driving on High St.! Apparently the hippies wake up kind of late, because there was plenty of parking available in the one public lot near the center of town, and from there it was just a short walk to Glastonbury Abbey.

The history of archaeological excavations at Glastonbury Abbey is very checkered--the first archaeologist was also a spiritualist who believed that the dead spoke to the living, and he included some architectural features in his site maps that he hadn't actually found... but it was fine, because a spirit had used automatic writing to tell him it was there!

Ahem.

So there's a lot still not understood about Glastonbury Abbey and its history of occupation, but the museum did have some cool artifacts:

These cool artifacts include some contemporary ones, as the museum also displayed stuff they found during a recent dredging of the pond on their site:

And, of course, it had the obligatory several shelves of used books for sale!

I wish now that I'd purchased that Misty Copeland memoir and the A to Z Atlas of London and Suburbs.

Then, out the door to explore!

You know we love our architectural ruins! This is the Lady Chapel, supposedly sited on top of an even earlier "Old Church." There are glass walkways that allow you to cross the ruins at height, and stairs that give you access to the lower levels. Grass and flowers grow on the tops of the stones and in the cracks in the walls.

I love how they arranged site access so you can see and explore these formerly underground areas.

This site was fun to research with the kids, because it is VERY steeped in the spiritual/mystical woo of Glastonbury. I didn't buy the map of ley lines that I saw in one of the High St. shops (a fact that I actually super regret now...), but apparently we're just walking right over all kinds of crossing ley lines here!

Just east of the Lady Chapel is the Great Church, dating from around 1230:

Once upon a time, it was the second largest church in England, but during its construction it fell on hard times and upkeep and renovations got too expensive. Fortunately, monks discovered that King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, long associated with the area by legend, were actually buried on the property! Yay! The monks got tons of money after that, they were able to finish building the church, and they reburied Arthurus Rex in the middle of the Great Church:

We walked around the grounds of the old abbey, exploring the space and admiring the views--

Here's where King Arthur's grave was discovered!

The site also has a surviving plant from two thorn trees that used to grow on a nearby hill. They were seen as holy thorns, possibly originating from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, who local legend has it possibly visited here with a little lad Jesus back in the day. The Puritans, being religious extremists, cut down those original thorn trees, but lots of local gardeners had their own cuttings, and this tree is said to be from one of them:

There was a shuttle from the nearby visitor center to the base of Glastonbury Tor, but it only took cash, alas, so after exploring the abbey grounds, we walked the 1.3 miles from the abbey to the tor, uphill all the way:

The path is that way!

The pedestrian footpath was actually really nice, ranging along wooded paths and through gates that led us across fields and under arches of overhanging ancient trees:

Getting closer!

This was a HARD fucking hike, and my asshole family left me completely in the dust:

There's no place to sit and rest other than in the nettles next to the path, no place to really make it easy to pass someone who's slowly huffing their way upwards, and behind me as I slowly huffed were at least a dozen various UK vacationers taking their kids up the tor for a Saturday afternoon picnic. Not only was I about to die of a myocardial infarction, but I had to keep up my pace so as not to inconvenience the people following me. Also, my face gets REALLY red when I'm hot. Like, REALLY really red, so a couple of times total strangers asked me if I was well. 

I finally made it, quietly weeping and absolutely beside myself with embarrassment and exhaustion. 

But look at that view!

Check out these rats who left me to die, hanging out as happy as clams without me:

To get back to the abbey, you just do the trek in reverse:

But fortunately the ice cream truck at the base of the tor DOES take credit!

It's also much easier to enjoy how pretty the walk is when I'm walking downhill:

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon window shopping along High Street, where they have SO many awesomely woo stores. I particularly liked The Coven, White Rabbit, Goddess and the Green Man, and Speaking Tree, but there were so many little shops with tarot cards, dragon statues, sword letter openers, needle felted goddesses, etc., interspersed with hippies on the street giving away free hugs and trying to sell beaded necklaces. 

We bought sandwiches and crisps from a little co-op grocery, ate them near another thorn tree on the grounds of St. John the Baptist Church, then hopped back in the car for a quick two-hour drive to the sea. 

We landed in an inn in Instow, which on this Saturday before a Bank Holiday Monday was HOPPING! The whole town was bonkers crowded. Matt had to drop us off and park a mile away at a cricket club, then he and I hung out downstairs in the pub chaos for a while before our proper dinner:

Our rooms above the pub didn't have any air conditioning, so we had to leave our windows open (also no screens--does England not have rabid bats?) to the noise below, including a live band. I really wanted my sleep, but it *was* pretty magical to be lying in bed, reading my surfer memoir--

--and listening to the magic that is every single person in the pub below me loudly singing the lyrics to an Oasis song:

I think it's the most British thing I experienced on this entire trip!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!