Here’s a small photo set from a recent weekend wandering around Ogmore-by-Sea, a beautiful stretch of coastline steeped in Geological history. Ogmore is a very popular place, especially on weekends when you can expect to encounter every dog walker from within a 10 mile radius.
I used to visit these characteristically stepped limestone beds while I was studying Geology. The geology exposed along the sea front is fascinating. The Limestone is loaded with fossils from an ancient 350 million year old coral reef, when the UK was part of a string of tropical islands surrounded by warm shallow seas, just below the equator. The fossils are preserved in great detail and are incredibly easy to find once you get your eye in. Above the Limestone you can find the remains of violent flash flood which was deposited when the country was part of a huge desert. At this time the first dinosaurs were starting to spread around the globe around 200 million years ago.
The pebble beaches here are littered with rocks that shouldn’t really be there, you can easily pick up a rock from Scotland, the North Sea or even Arctic Norway. During the last Ice Age glaciers spreading from the Arctic dumped the rocks they had been carrying for thousands of years on the beaches as the ice slowly retreated.
Geology provides a fascinating insight and perspective. A tiny bit of knowledge can transport you back millions years to different worlds. Whenever I visit Ogmore and I watch the waves washing along the limestone shore, I imagine that if I stood in exactly the same place 350 million years ago, I might well have been standing on the beach of an ancient and alien tropical island, with the sea filled with strange and amazing creatures.