By Susannah Curtin.

December arrived with foggy days and gloomy, oppressive graphite-grey skies. I have longed for the sun to break through and, at last, it has. Today has dawned with a hoar frost, an ice-blue sky and not a breath of wind. The bright winter light is all the encouragement I need to head south from the Vale towards the Jurassic coastline, to while away the day looking for fossils and listening to the sound of waves breaking against the stony shoreline.

Some 71 per cent of our planet is made of ocean and I am not alone in being slightly obsessed with it. From time to time, I get a deep yearning to be beside it, in it or on it. Just like in Van Morrison’s uplifting song, I want to ‘smell the sea and feel the sky, and let my soul and spirit fly’.

The Jurassic coastline stretches for 95 miles from Exmouth to Studland, and is renowned for its frequent rockfalls and fossils.

Eventually, I find myself wrapped up warm and strolling beside the incoming tide. Tiny rhythmic waves grace the shore from an ocean as flat and still as glass. Cirrostratus and stratocumulus clouds lace the horizon. It is a perfect winter seascape.
Making my way down the beach, much has changed since my last visit. The Jurassic coastline stretches for 95 miles from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland, and is renowned for its frequent rockfalls and fossils. It is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as exposed in these colourful sea cliffs is a nearly continuous record of 185 million years of Earth’s history. The sedimentary rocks – sandstone, limestone and mudstone – record one of the world’s best sequences of the Mesozoic Era, in which