The Jurassic Coast at Lyme Regis

Collect from the beach, not from the cliff. That is the whole of the local etiquette and most of the local safety advice, and it works because the sea here does the excavating for you: landslips are common along this coast and every one of them delivers fresh fossils down onto the shingle.

The Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre, two miles east of Lyme Regis, is the right first stop. Admission is free, the displays show recent finds and who found them, and the wardens run guided fossil walks of about two hours that will teach you what an ammonite looks like when it is still half rock. Take that walk before your own, and the beach stops looking like gravel.

The coast itself was inscribed on the World Heritage List in December 2001, the first wholly natural World Heritage Site designated in the United Kingdom. It runs 96 miles from Orcombe Point near Exmouth in East Devon to Old Harry Rocks near Swanage, and erosion has laid bare an almost continuous sequence covering the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, some 185 million years of it. This ground has been desert, shallow tropical sea and marsh in its time, and each rock type carries its own fauna and flora, so you can watch life change as you walk. At Lyme Regis alone, 71 separate strata have been identified, each with its own species of ammonite.

Mary Anning lived here, from 1799 to 1847, and made her discoveries of marine reptiles at a time when palaeontology was barely a discipline. She followed her father into the trade in a town where fossils had mostly been picked up as a pastime or sold to visitors as curios, and she changed what they were understood to be.

The whole length of the site is walkable on the South West Coast Path.