Starfish

The abundance of life in the Jurassic seas meant there was plenty to eat for scavengers such as starfish.

The Great Unconformity and The Cretaceous Blanket

The sediments which make up the Jurassic Coastline were deposited in the following order, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, with the oldest rock, the Triassic sitting at the at the bottom of the pile.

Beer Stone and Beer Quarry Caves

Sandwiched in these cliffs between the Upper Greensand and Middle Chalk is the 95 million year old Beer Head Limestone. Beer Stone is a fine shelly chalk. 98 percent of chalk is composed from microscopic planktonic plant remains - coccoliths, but at Beer there was a current flowing across the seafloor and this winnowed away the coccoliths leaving a fine shelly Limestone. The Beer Stone outcrops at Beer beach but it only forms a very thin layer. However at Beer Head, the Hooken Landslide and 1 mile (1.5 km) inland from Beer village, the band of Limestone is much thicker and the quarry caves give a fascinating insight into the stone’s importance, as well as Beer’s history and the lives of the men who worked there.

Pebbles and Flints

The beach around Branscombe was once commercially removed by a company imaginatively called “Pebbles and Flints”, supplying companies such as ICI and Colgate with stone for use in their pulverizing machines.