Walton-on-the-Naze

Essex wasn't a great county for fossils but the beach at the small coastal town of Walton-on-the-Naze was an exception. We went there fairly frequently, sometimes taking a picnic, as on this occasion in 1986 when we went with the Thurston family. To the right is one of Katy's exchange students, Christel. My memory of that picnic is that it was made different by John bringing along a very acceptable bottle of white wine.

It was a beautifully warm day much enjoyed by both families - Katy Thurston is at left. It amuses me that we still have the blue plastic cool box behind Lizzie, which I think came originally from Jamaica.

I include this picture to prove that Katy was also there and so we can all admire the girls' taste in sunglasses.

The London Clay ran along the base of Walton's crumbling cliffs, and this was overlain by Red Crag, both strata being full of fossils. The Crag fossils were mostly snails and bivalves - two of the best-known being a bivalve, Glycimeris, and....

....Neptunea contraria, the contraria because the snail coiled to the left, while the vast majority of snails coil to the right.

However, we went to Walton mainly to collect the spectacular sharks teeth washed out of the London Clay. They're small, the longest being 300mm, so to find them one had to sift through the areas....

....where the finest pebbles had accumulated, something which John Thurston and I were quite happy to spend hours doing. An additional spur was that the London Clay at Walton has produced some huge sharks' teeth, bigger than those in today's great white: we never found any.