An Unnatural History of Britain

CHAPTER 2

THE GREEN DRAGON

I'VE NOT SEEN Swanage Bay from this vantage point. The beach is around 3 miles (14km) away, so much of the town is lost behind the gentle Purbeck roll and an early morning haze. I can see a fair chunk of Ballard Cliff, at the northern sweep of the bay, but the Old Harry Rocks are masked by the landscape, while the Isle of Wight, which I should be able to see in the distance, is lost to the veil. It feels a little like seeing a face from the distant past. There is familiarity without instant recognition: a moment of hesitation as you struggle to dig the detail from your memory and fit features around familiar eyes.

Swanage is the hometown of my father. His family moved there from the London suburbs following the Second World War, when Dad was 12 and just entering his formative years. Purbeck offered quite the playground: sailing, fishing, model-railway building and exploring. When he left, his father and sister remained, and I still have cousins in the town. We made regular visits through my childhood, but the views I grew familiar with were far more intimate and engaging than the glimpse of today. I feel as though if I stand on tiptoe and lean far enough forward, I will be able to see what I know is there. And I'd like to see more: it is a place that often fills my dreams. Instead though, I must turn my back and pick a short route south to find the Priest's Way, so named because it formed the route of the local vicar who, from the late thirteenth century, would serve the churches of St Nicholas in Worth Matravers and St Mary in Swanage. In more recent years, the path has provided a different kind of pilgrimage (certainly for many of my relations and their friends), for people making for The Square and Compass at Worth. The effort of walking the steady incline to the pub rewarded by a gentle, downhill stagger home.

It will be several hours before the pub is open today. In an effort to dodge the worst of the traffic, I left home before 7 a.m., sneaking past Dorchester before the daily snarl-up and timing this interlude to coincide with the urban commutes and school runs. My ultimate destination is Boscombe, just to the east of Bournemouth, and mid-morning traffic should be easier to manage than rush hour. My target there will be lizards, two non-native species including one that can grow up to 40cm (16in) long. First though, I thought I would come here and look for evidence of the lizards that Dorset is probably most famous for.

Purbeck stone has been quarried since the Roman occupation and possibly earlier. The limestone beds were once part of a brackish or freshwater lagoon system some 150 million years ago. The layers of sedimentary rock are known as the Purbeck Group and the area in which I am walking is situated upon the Durlston Formation which includes a thin layer of fossiliferous limestone known as Purbeck Marble. Although not a true marble, which is formed from metamorphic rock, Purbeck Marble can be polished and has long been sought as a result. It has been used in the construction of cathedrals, such as Salisbury, Canterbury and Lincoln, along with Westminster Abbey.

Aside from the marble, which forms a layer never thicker than 120cm (47in), there are other seams that have been used locally for building, road signs (the residents of Shitterton had a village sign carved from Purbeck stone to prevent it getting stolen) and drystone walling. The walls are a distinctive part of the landscape, and I pass cattle, sheep and horses grazing within drystone fields. There is a strange sense of in-between, the heat of summer sucking spring dry of sound. The birdsong has all but ceased, save for the chat of jackdaws and caw of crows who sit sentinel on piles of quarried stone. A snatch of whitethroat floats through the mist, but the world seems to be waiting. If I didn't know the date, then I would think it mid-August not June. The slight chill that follows a cool night under clear skies, the sun struggling to blow away the clouded linger. But the ground is not dewed as it might be in a couple of months. There is a dampness in the air and puddled reminders of recent rain, but today should herald a settled spell of warmth. When the sun does burn through it will take a grip for at least a week, but the world, for the moment, is not too sure.

The Priest's Way looks to have been recently dressed with a layer of Purbeck chippings, and it is comfortable underfoot. I pause to admire the sculptured sweep of a drystone wall and then follow a signpost and hop across the flagstones to the quarry. The Keates family have quarried on Purbeck since the seventeenth century, moving to their current site in the 1950s. Their working quarry can be visited by appointment and produces an array of fossils, but of interest to many (and to me this morning) is this former working beside which I now stand. In 1997, Kevin Keates and Trev Haysom were working this shallow quarry - now known as Spyway - when they uncovered what looked like footprints on the exposed lower freestone. They suspended work and covered the prints with geosynthetic fabric to protect them against weathering. The National Trust then took charge of the site and made the area safe for visitation, uncovering the footprints and allowing public access from 2016.

There are around 130 prints of differing sizes, believed to have been made by sauropod species that were feeding or drinking in the shallow edges of a lagoon. They are considered 'poorly preserved', a rating that seems hard to argue against as I first step on to the strata. Most of the prints are tricky to discern, aberrations in the surface of the rock that I might not even have noticed were I not looking. One or two are better defined, though. Circular, with what look like toe indentations and of a size that makes my size 11 wellies look insignificant alongside. At one angle, as I squat down to get a different perspective, I can see a pattern that was surely made by a single animal. A thin layer of dust has collected in the prints and remained moist as the surrounding rock has dried, giving them greater definition. The two lines are equally spaced and offer context through a sense of movement. Here walked an animal larger than an elephant, but not necessarily a giant of its time. Brachiosaurs, a species of which likely made these prints, were among the largest of dinosaurs. Fossils suggest they grew as long as 22m (72ft) and weighed up to 50 tons. A size that seems as impossible to comprehend as the amount of time that has passed since its existence. What I did not expect before coming here was how shallow the quarry workings would be. The sediment was folded up by land movement (known specifically here as the Purbeck Monocline), leaving these layers prominent beneath the soil. The roll of rock is distinct, while at the eastern end of the quarry is an exposed face which shows perfectly the sponge-cake layers of strata. It is, quite literally, a representation of time's passing: 150 million years between my head and toes. If I consider it too deeply then my head begins to spin. It's like staring up at the Milky Way and trying to comprehend the vastness of it all.

I must be wary of the time this morning, though. As the sun steadily rises, I need to make tracks of my own.

The coast of Dorset is certainly diverse. Boasting Europe's largest natural harbour at Poole; the highest point on the south coast at Golden Cap; the 18-mile (29km) long shingle-based barrier beach at Chesil; the tied island of Portland, where the stone is arguably more renowned than that of Purbeck; and cliffs that range from the chalk white of Old Harry in the east through the golden sandstone of West Bay and the blackened mud seams and beef rock of Charmouth and Lyme Regis in the west. Almost all of it is part of the 'Jurassic Coast', a UNESCO World Heritage Site that stretches almost 100 miles (161km) between the Old Harry Rocks and Orcombe Point in Devon. A roil of rock that makes a geological map of Dorset look like swirls of engine oil in a puddle of water.

In many ways, the slice of strata in Spyway quarry represents the Dorset coast in miniature, and the accessibility to rock 150 million years old is also mirrored. Cliff falls along the coast are common, particularly with the extremes of weather that so weaken the mass. Despite the dangers (tragedies have occurred and will, sadly, again), people clamber over the fresh falls within hours, some curious, others seeking fossilised treasure. Such accessibility to items representative of distant history has long astonished, while the quarry at Spyway is a reminder that we don't have to dig very deep, or wait for landslips, to make discoveries. Without knowledge of geology, fossil preservation or land movement such as the Purbeck Monocline, it might seem that freshly exposed remains were also freshly produced. Quite a concern should we stumble upon dinosaur footprints but sparking panic should we unearth their bones. The presumption of our own ancestors in such a position would surely have been the obvious - that these remains were from creatures of now and not the past. Animals that shared the contemporary world and should, understandably, be feared.

There exist legends where this connection appears overt. Quarrying work near Kilve, to the north of the Quantock Hills in Somerset, in the early part of the nineteenth century, uncovered the skull of an ichthyosaur. At the time, this was widely believed to be the remains of Blue Ben, a dragon that had lived on nearby Putsham Hill. Local legend suggested that after breathing fire, Blue Ben would cool down in the shallow waters of the coastal flats, but one day got stuck in the mud, which is where he remained. What is...