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Doc. Davidson, did a good trade in antihistamine sun cream
in the evenings.
To begin at the beginning, we met at our Swanage hotel
on the Friday evening, May 22nd, full of anticipation. We
had already been primed, through a monumental sheaf of
notes that our leader, Ron Coates, had taken a great deal
of trouble to write out and duplicate for us, so that we had
some idea of what to expect in the way of geology, but it
could not prepare us for the delightful scenery we were to
see in the next three days.
Our starting-point for the first day's outing was
Osmington Mills — a cluster of houses, boat sheds, and a
public house that had the inevitable associations with
smugglers, all in a narrow valley with a stream that
splashed and gurgled over its rocky bed in a way that no
Essex stream does, and eventually cascaded over a ledge of
rock to sink in the shingle and reach the sea by invisible
ways,, The strata here sloped to show a good sequence of
clays and grits with beds of coral-bearing fossils,
especially the lamelibranch, Trigonia huddlestoni.
Impressions of Ammonites
were quite common, some
measuring a foot across.
Dr. Davidson made the find
of the day with a reptilian
vertebra nearly four inches
across.
It was a tired but very
satisfied party that sat down
to dinner at the end of the
first day, and looking
forward to the next.
It was announced on the
Sunday morning that our route