Which do you prefer: stacks of bread and butter, or piles of books, or maybe even layers of sponge cake? I’ve used all of these and more to show how the rocks of the Yorkshire coast fit together. That’s what they are, just layers of rock – let’s call them strata – with the oldest at the bottom and the youngest at the top.

What makes this coast so brilliant for geologists is that each stratum of rock extends over great distances. This means you can trace a rock like the Dogger all the way along the coast from Runswick Bay to Ravenscar; the same Hambleton Oolite seen north of Helmsley forms the top of Oliver’s Mount 30 miles away.

And this stacking up of strata makes it easy to trace changes in conditions through time. If a bed of dark shale sits on top of a pale rock then you’re looking at a reduction in oxygen – due to a deepening of the sea or a change in its chemistry. This all works so well because most of the rocks were laid down on level sea floors that extended over miles in every direction – which in turn produces nice level and extensive strata.

But not all the rocks on the coast are like this. In the Middle Jurassic period this area changed from a deep sea to a vast delta – a coastal area with a shifting array of streams, sandbanks, forests and beaches. In contrast to the level, uniform seabed this was a varied and changing environment.

And so, not surprisingly, Middle Jurassic rocks vary from place to place. From Ravenscar to well south of Scarborough the cliffs and scars are a complex mix of river sandstones, beach deposits, shallow sea limestones and gritstones. The rock platforms show a fascinating series of features from the Jurassic delta. River channels, meander belts, even the shifting patterns of streams are preserved in fantastic detail.

The Yorkshire coast is a natural theme park for geologists, having variation from place to place as well as up and down the strata is just one more remarkable feature of this natural wonder.

How do you spot something when you don’t know what you’re looking for? How do those brilliant people on TV manage to see signs of recent wildlife activity, or buried buildings, or ancient landscapes? How come you never find fossils when geologists like Roger Osborne tell you that they’re everywhere? Well, you’re not alone.

Every geologist’s favourite story about fieldwork concerns Charles Darwin, the most brilliant observer of the natural world who ever lived. In 1831, when he was 22, Darwin travelled to North Wales with his mentor Adam Sedgwick:

‘We spent many hours in Cwm Idal examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them.’ Wales was a key place for geologists investigating the Palaeozoic era but, as Darwin wrote later, there was something there that they both missed: ‘Neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, and the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that a house burnt down by fire could not tell its story more plainly than did this valley.’

So two of the most famous geologists in history did not see the history of the landscape right under their noses. They had an excuse: the idea that ice sheets had covered northern Europe in relatively recent times had not yet been suggested. Once the ice ages were proposed by Louis Agassiz in 1837 geologists began to see evidence for ice sheets everywhere – because now they knew what they were looking for.

This is a neat illustration of the impossibility of what philosophers call ‘the innocent eye’. Whatever we look at, whatever we experience, our vision is always guided by what we already know. Except in childhood, we never see anything with an innocent eye. The same landscape will look completely different once you know how it was formed; the same pebble becomes magical once you know it contains a 150 million-year-old ammonite. Learn a little geology and your world can, quite literally, be transformed.

A touch of frost can reveal all kinds of hidden delights. A couple of weeks ago I spotted a spider’s web stretched across the outside of our kitchen window. Reaching from the top middle to the bottom corner of the frame, it measured around a metre in each direction. The moisture in the air had stuck to the web and frozen, and now the morning sunlight was turning it into a dazzling open tapestry of extraordinary delicacy.

My immediate thought: such an amazing piece of work was surely not made just to catch flies. Or was it? Are the drifts of mayflower that cover our hedges just there to attract bees? Is the thrill we get from seeing a humpback whale breaking surface, or a cloud of starlings making patterns in the sky just an accident of nature, a piece of human self-indulgence?

Our ancestors thought not. They believed that the world and all its creatures had been made for the pleasure and delight (as well as the cooking pots) of human beings. And it was this belief that caused a major crisis in human thought, brought on by the discovery of some extraordinary fossils.

In the early 1800s bones of enormous reptiles were being discovered all across Europe. A Frenchman called Georges Cuvier became famous for his skill in putting the bones together, and soon these giants were given the name ‘dinosaurs’. However, by this time Captain Cook and others had sailed to most corners of the world and they weren’t seeing dinosaurs anywhere! Nor were they seeing giant plesiosaurs, like the fossils from the alum quarries of the Yorkshire coast. And authoritative classical authors like Aristotle and Pliny didn’t mention these animals at all.

The logical conclusion was that these giants had lived on the earth in the distant past but had died out before humans (or at least educated humans) had appeared. This was hard to swallow and a movement called Scriptural Geology was formed to combat the idea. Things came to a head at the inaugural British Association meeting in York in 1831. The mayor George Hudson, the famous railway king, was asked by the Dean of York Minster to bar geologists from the meeting, prompting Hudson to declare that, after much thought ‘We’ve decided for Moses and the Dean!’ It was a short-lived victory for the scripturalists, and once Darwin showed that extinction was an essential part of evolution they melted away.

So, it seems that the world was not created for the delight of humans, and is quite able to rumble along without us being there to see it. But in another way the Scriptural Geologists have proved correct. It is, after all, human ingenuity that has unearthed the fossils of extinct creatures and re-imagined the worlds in which they flourished.

And all this we have done so that extinct creatures that died out millions of years before we existed can, after all this time, bring us pleasure and delight.

Hot-foot this month from a tourism seminar. You probably know the kind of thing: arrive for coffee at 9:30 and spend the day feeling your backside going numb while a series of people try to keep awake with Powerpoint. Except this was quite different. A fascinating look at how people these days are more interested in experiences than possessions [OK not everyone] and want the same on their holidays.

So the trend-setting tourist of today and tomorrow wants stuff to do and to remember. And so do we all. Try this test: Do you want to lie on a sunbed reading Jeffrey Archer and turning into a cooked lobster, or would you rather go out on a boat from Staithes and catch a lobster to bring back for your tea? Do you fancy a pub where the staff wear uniforms and name badges and the beer is OK; or one where the landlady owns the place, greets you by name, serves fantastic beer brewed in Scarborough, and wants to know what you think of it?

What’s all this got to do with rocks and fossils? Well it so happens that the Yorkshire coast is teeming with ready-made experiences thanks to our landscape, which means our geology, plus we have the best fossils. If you want things to remember on holiday then finding your own fossils is right up there – it doesn’t get much more real than holding a Jurassic creature in the palm of your hand, after all this guy was alive around 180 million years ago. As one of the speakers pointed out: put a photo of your new sofa on Facebook and no-one’s impressed, but post a pic of little Louise with a socking great ammonite she’s just found at Cayton Bay and world flips over.

Thankfully the world is beginning to take notice and more and more people are coming to our coast in search of real experiences – those of us who live here can have them all year round.