At high tide the waves of the English Channel lap the base of the cliffs at Lyme, the little white talons of the sea grabbing at grey mud, revealing little gems like this. It’s not a dinosaur – despite this being the Jurassic Coast, you can abandon any hopes of finding a T-Rex from Jurassic Park – but you can probably find an ammonite. Or if you’re very lucky, a bit of a plesiosaur or an ichthyosaur.

I’m not fossil expert and I don’t feel the inclination to try and identify what this once was. At first sight, it feels like a tiger’s scratch marks. Perhaps it’s a series of parallel bones from something’s rib-cage. Or maybe a shoal of little fishes, caught in the seabed somewhere between 65 and 250 million years ago.

What’s so magical about this place is that it’s not a static landscape. It is clearly moving. At the base of the cliffs are piles of grey earth which look like they've just been dumped from a digger truck. If you hang around for a few moments something will fall off. And so, visitors are invited to take just a little bit of this natural phenomenon home with them. It’s a fun way to engage with nature, more so than any other coastal walk you might have been on. Just be careful going after a storm – that’s when the good stuff gets washed out of the cliffs, but it’s also when people sometimes get squashed.