Folkestone’s
By Catherine Cox
Finds
Walk along the wilder bits of coast and it’s easy to imagine it has always remained the same. However, if you were to travel back 20,000 years you’d find a strikingly different landscape inhabited by woolly mammoths. Go back 110 million years and you’d have been paddling in a warm, shallow sea at a latitude similar to the Mediterranean. The sand between your toes would become the Greensands rock beneath Hythe and Folkestone and your footprints could be preserved for millennia as trace fossils. Fast forward to the present and it is possible to get a sense of that lost landscape by hunting for the fossils that remain. In Hythe, the fossils are all locked beneath the surface but just along the coast at Folkestone is one of the best fossil hunting locations in Britain. It is a SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) site so you mustn’t hammer at the cliffs but there are plenty of fossils washed out and scattered along the shore. Hunt in the shingle around the boulders east of the main beach or west of the Warren. Many of the Folkestone fossils are dark
8 | www.hythelife.org.uk
in colour and quite heavy. They stand out and are easy to spot once you know what you are looking for. Folkestone museum is full of examples of amazing specimens and although you are unlikely to find a perfectly preserved crab or ichthyosaur paddle, the frequency of finds means that you’d be unlucky (or unobservant!) not to find something. There are ammonites, shells, sharks’ teeth, coral, fish bones, wood and worm burrows in relative abundance as well as (much more rarely) crustaceans and reptiles. In 2017, dinosaur tracks were found in Folkestone - so who knows what else could be waiting? The source of the Folkestone fossils are the exposed rocks in the cliff. These were all laid down during the Cretaceous period but there are three distinct layers and all have fossils in them. The oldest (at the bottom) are the lower Greensands (so called because the mineral glauconite gives them a greenish colour). These were created by sediment washed off the land and deposited on an ancient sea bed around 110 million years ago. Above the Greensands is the Gault Clay (used by Romans for making tiles). Clay is made from fine silty sediment. Being light, the sediment can travel far from shore and was laid down around 108 million years ago when the sea level had risen and the land upon which Folkestone now sits was further from land. Above the clay is chalk. Chalk is made up of coccoliths which are microscopic plates of calcium carbonate which come from the bodies of microscopic algae. Chalk forms in a deep marine environment, too far from land
for sediment from the shore to be deposited. Fossils found in situ can be used to date the layers as well as to provide evidence for the changes to the environment. If you want to try and identify the fossils that you find and see where they fit into the picture, there are several good websites containing local information, as well as the recently published book Fossils of Folkestone, Kent by Philip Hadland. Like pretty much anything fun, fossil hunting can be risky. We’ve taken our children (aged six and one) fossil hunting at Folkestone regularly, but the rocks can be slippery and you need to be aware of the tide. To stay safe:
• Check the tide times • Don’t go too close to the cliff face • Be careful of slippery rocks • Supervise children