We all love our visitors but for the good citizens of Scarborough autumn comes as a bit of a relief. No more traffic queues (we live in hope) and miles of lovely empty beaches. This summer we have been taking people of every age, size and type out to the beaches looking for fossils, now there’s space for everyone to have a look. Mooching through banks of pebbles soon brings bucket-loads of fossil corals, oysters, mussels, ammonites, gastropods and belemnites. They’re all there – you just need to know what to look for. Most of these fossils are from the Jurassic rocks of the coast. But the Yorkshire coast has other treasures to offer.
Yorkshire’s Jurassic rocks are from 200 to 150 million years old, but in the last couple of million years ice sheets have moved south over this area bringing mud, rocks and pebbles from across northern Europe. When the ice melted all this debris was left behind – a swathe of glacial mud covers the coast in a wide strip reaching from north of Staithes down to Flamborough.
The mud is regularly washed onto the beaches by rain from above and waves from below; the mud gets dissolved and the rocks and pebbles get left behind. So we end up with a dazzling variety of pebbles from all over northern Europe: granites and gneisses from the Lake District and Scotland; reef corals from the Pennines; porphyry and volcanics from Scandinavia, as well as semi-precious carnelians and garnets.
The ice sheets brought big boulders as well, known as glacial erratics. There’s one at the corner of Valley Road and Royal Avenue, and another at Crossgates. So next time you’re on the beach at Cayton Bay or Filey or Reighton Gap have a good look at the pebbles – you’ll find local fossils but also exotic stones from across northern Europe. For a guide to pebbles on this coast see our Beach Finds on the Yorkshire Coast, available from the Bookshelf on Victoria Road and from Woodend Workspace.