Watchet is rich in reptile remains and ammonites are also common. There are also some spectacular faults, which can be seen along with fossil casts of giant ammonites on the foreshore. This is a must-visit location for anyone in the area who is into fossils.
DIRECTIONS
♦ ACCESS 1: There is a car park near the small museum in the centre of Watchet, next to the harbour. The museum contains examples of locally found fossils (including an ichthyosaur skeleton) and books illustrating the fossils and strata of the area. Postcode: TA23 0AN
♦ Take the narrow footpath running next to the steam railway line (with the sea on your left hand side) and follow it up onto the cliff top. After a pleasant walk (of about half a kilometre), you reach a long set of steps onto the beach (with a good handrail).
♦ Once on the beach, head away from the lighthouse The rocks around the lighthouse are all Triassic and unfossiliferous.
♦ ACCESS 2: You can park along the promenade at Blue Anchor, walking East, go past Blue Anchor point and round the corner the Jurassic rocks start. Postcode: TA24 6JR
♦ ACCESS 3: From Blue Anchor (Note: The road from Watchet to Blue Anchor is now permanently closed), access the coastal road to Warren Bay Campsite which is just before the old road is closed off. Park at bottom of the campsite (with permission at reception), and access the beach from the middle of the bay. The concrete slope can be steep and sometimes slippery. Postcode: TA23 OJR
♦ What3Words to the main collecting site: ///handrail.remaining.confining
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PROFILE INFO
FIND FREQUENCY: ♦♦♦♦♦ – Watchet is very productive, but the best time to collect is during scouring conditions on the foreshore. Many reptile remains can be collected just west of Warren Bay.
CHILDREN: ♦♦♦♦♦ – This location is suitable for family trips and for young children, as fossils can be found on the foreshore.
ACCESS: ♦♦♦ – Access to the beach at Watchet can be achieved usually by parking in the town and walking from Watchet Harbour along the beach. However, if you want a more direct route, head for Warren Bay Campsite, just outside Watchet and park there. Follow the footpath directly to Warren Bay.
TYPE: – Watchet is a foreshore and cliff location, so fossils can be found in both. However, the vast majority are found in rocks on the foreshore or exposed during scouring tides.
FOSSIL HUNTING
Watchet is a bit of an unpredictable location. Sometimes, you can come away with nothing and other times buckets full. Much depends on beach conditions, but always take the right tools. It is also a good location for collecting bones from plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, although fresh cliff falls are often required. The bone in the photo was found in a bolder on the foreshore.
Bivalves, including scallop shells, oysters and Gryphaea are also common at Watchet and crinoid slabs are common around Warren Bay. Many ammonites can be found, although they are mainly broken, unless you are lucky enough to arrive after a fresh cliff fall. They can be found scattered on the foreshore, but are usually just fragments. However, occasionally, you will get an ammonite in a small nodule or, if lucky, a complete ammonite that has fallen out of its nodule.
The second prime location for ammonites is at the location from where most of the bones are found, that is, past the major fault which has been undercut by the sea where the Lias starts again. Ammonites are also often found in the fine shingle heading towards Blue Anchor. The rock (shale) in the bottom layer is extremely soft and wet, and fractures into fine sheets when stressed. In some areas, this shale contains imprints of ammonites (up to 30cm in diameter). A number of small whole and sections of larger pearly ammonites can also be found from this layer scattered around on the rock platforms.
Rocks from the Triassic Blue Anchor bone bed can also be found, which contain fish, reptile and shark remains. There are two main locations where bones can be found, although, generally, they can be found anywhere on the foreshore. The first is from the foreshore where the entrance to the camp site is, stretching west, until you reach the red Triassic beds. The second is when you reach the massive fault that the sea always reaches (which is notable for the algae and overhangs). Beyond this point, the Lias begins again just before Blue Anchor. This is the main location from where bones are found. The bones come from the top part of the cliff, and they often fall and can be picked up from the foreshore.
Between Warren Bay and Blue Anchor, there is a large Triassic rock in the middle of the foreshore. If you search along the foreshore around this area, crinoid slabs can be found. The yellowish limestone blocks surrounding the steps originate from the cliff and are rich in a variety of bivalves, including scallop shells, oysters and Gryphaea. The rock is quite hard but, if you search the foreshore around the blocks, you can find well preserved shells, especially oysters and Gryphaea buried in the sand.
Rock platforms extend along most of the foreshore. At certain times of the year, they become buried in sand and/or mud deposits and can be difficult to access.
At very low tides, searching the mud at the waterline can yield some excellently preserved specimens. Local reports have included instances of finding whole crinoids (although these do not appear to feature in the rocks further along the foreshore).
Ammonites are also often found within the fine shingle heading towards Blue Anchor. In many places the rock platforms contain two quite distinct rock layers. While it is difficult to extract fossils from the very soft shale due to its texture, the white ammonites can be extracted by carefully using a chisel to split off sheets of rock. (Fossils need to be placed into a protective container. As specimens dry, they tend to split from the surrounding rock and crumble. Slow the drying process by keeping the fossils wrapped in plastic with small air holes for several weeks seems to work well.)
The rock in the top layer of the photograph showing the bedding structure lacks fine bedding planes and is much easier to handle. In some areas, it contains white ammonites or imprints of them.
GEOLOGY
Watchet sits on the north Somerset coast where the land meets the Bristol Channel, and its “everyday” landscape—low cliffs, wave-cut platforms, small bays and a sheltered harbour—is tightly controlled by a narrow slice of Earth history spanning the very end of the Triassic and the beginning of the Jurassic. The town lies on the edge of the broader sedimentary basins of southern Britain, where repeated changes in sea level, climate and tectonic movement built a layered sequence of mudstones, shales and limestones. Those layers are then cut and crumpled by faults linked to long-lived basin structures and to the presence of subsurface evaporites (salts and sulphates) that can flow, dissolve and collapse, giving the Watchet coast its reputation for striking deformation features as well as fossils.
The oldest rocks seen around Watchet belong to the upper part of the Mercia Mudstone Group, a package dominated by red-brown mudstones and siltstones that records predominantly continental conditions in Late Triassic time. These fine-grained sediments accumulated on very low-relief ground, in environments that repeatedly swung between shallow water and exposure. In practical terms, that history is written into the rocks as blocky, structureless mudstones punctuated by reduction patches, thin sandier beds, desiccation features and abundant evaporite minerals. Gypsum occurs widely as nodules and veins, and the chemistry of the sediments points to restricted drainage and evaporation—exactly the kind of setting in which saline lakes, mudflats and sabkha-like plains can form. Around Watchet, these Mercia Mudstone beds are important not just as “the red clays in the cliffs”, but because they provide the mechanically weak, clay-rich foundations that encourage slope instability and help focus later faulting and deformation along the coast.
Up-section, the Mercia Mudstone Group becomes noticeably paler and greener as it passes into the Blue Anchor Formation, a distinctive unit that is famous on the west Somerset coast. The Blue Anchor Formation is dominated by grey-green to pale green dolomitic mudstones and siltstones, commonly with thin, hard, buff-coloured dolomitic beds and with features such as lamination, mudcracks, occasional halite pseudomorphs and locally abundant gypsum. This is a key transition interval: it represents the waning of strongly oxidising “red-bed” conditions and the growing influence of brackish to marine waters at the very end of the Triassic. The coastal exposures between Blue Anchor and Watchet are especially important because they show the full character of these “tea-green” and grey marls and how they grade upward into the next major environmental shift.
That next shift is the Rhaetian marine transgression recorded by the Penarth Group. At its base sits the Westbury Formation, typically a dark, organic-rich succession of mudstones or shales with thin limestones, sandstones and distinctive fossil-rich horizons commonly referred to as bone beds. In environmental terms, the contrast with the underlying Blue Anchor Formation is dramatic: the Westbury Formation marks the establishment of persistent marine conditions, with repeated reworking during storms and sea-level fluctuations producing shelly and bone-rich layers. Above it lies the Lilstock Formation, which captures a more variable, shallow-water story. Its lower part (the Cotham Member) includes grey-green mudstones, siltstones and sandstones formed in very shallow lagoons and tidal-flat settings that could periodically dry out, while the upper part (the Langport Member, historically known in many places as the “White Lias”) includes fine-grained, porcellanous limestones and calcareous mudstones representing very shallow shelf-lagoon environments. This Penarth Group succession is central to Watchet’s geological significance because it records the step-by-step switch from continental evaporitic plains to fully marine sedimentation just before the Jurassic began.
The boundary interval between the Triassic and Jurassic is exceptionally well displayed near Watchet, especially at St Audrie’s Bay a short distance to the east, and along nearby foreshore sections. Here, subtle changes in lithology and fossil content become globally important: the transition from Penarth Group sediments into the lowermost Lias Group includes beds that have long been debated and intensively studied because they sit right at the system boundary. Internationally, the base of the Jurassic is defined biostratigraphically by the first appearance of the ammonite genus Psiloceras, rather than purely by a change in rock type. In the Watchet area, the earliest Jurassic ammonites (notably Psiloceras planorbis) are historically significant and help anchor interpretations of where the boundary lies within the classic “Blue Lias” style succession. The result is that the Watchet coast is not only fossil-rich, but also a place where the fine detail of sedimentation, sea-level change and early Jurassic biotic recovery can be read directly from the rocks.
The lowest Jurassic strata in this area are part of the Lias Group, and the best-known unit within it is the Blue Lias Formation: a rhythmic alternation of limestones and calcareous mudstones or siltstones, with individual limestone beds commonly decimetre-scale in thickness. This alternation reflects repeated environmental or chemical shifts in shallow marine conditions, producing beds that weather into characteristic ledges and steps on the foreshore. The Blue Lias is also one of the key fossil-bearing units around Watchet and the wider north Somerset coast, known for ammonites and bivalves and for occasional vertebrate remains. Above the Blue Lias, the succession becomes more mudstone-dominated in formations such as the Charmouth Mudstone, reflecting changes in sediment supply and water depth across the Early Jurassic seas. Together, these rocks turn the coast into a natural cross-section through time, where bedding rhythms, fossil horizons and subtle changes in colour or carbonate content can be followed laterally for long distances.
What makes Watchet particularly memorable, though, is not only the stratigraphy but the structure: faults, folds and deformation zones are common on the foreshore and in the cliffs. Several factors combine to produce this. First, the Bristol Channel margin has a long tectonic history, and faults have been repeatedly reactivated as stresses changed through time. Second, Triassic successions in southern Britain commonly include evaporites at depth; salt can move (halokinesis) and both salt and gypsum can dissolve, creating voids and collapse structures that disrupt the overlying beds. Around Watchet, this combination produces localised folding, complex small-scale faulting, slickensided surfaces and disturbed zones where otherwise simple layer-cake stratigraphy becomes contorted. In places, faulting juxtaposes quite different units—dark marine shales and limestones against red or green mudstones—so that a short walk along the shore can cross large stratigraphic jumps. These structural complications are not just academic: they influence cliff stability, groundwater flow, and where particular beds are exposed (or hidden) along the coast.
Coastal processes then sculpt these rocks into the landforms people see. The Bristol Channel is highly tidal, and the repeated wetting and drying of broad intertidal areas encourages the development of extensive shore platforms on softer mudstones and interbedded limestone–mudstone successions alike. Around the Blue Anchor–Watchet–Lilstock stretch, platforms can be remarkably wide, and their surfaces often reflect the bedding architecture: limestones form more resistant ribs and low scarps, while mudstones weather into gentler, muddier benches. Where mudstones dominate, the platforms can be smoother and more easily cut back, but they are also prone to slumping and landsliding where waves undercut the base of cliffs. Cliff heights and platform widths vary along the coast according to rock type, structure and exposure to wave energy, producing a patchwork of bays, headlands and stepped foreshore profiles rather than a single uniform coastal form.
Finally, the modern surface cover adds a last layer of complexity. Valley bottoms and stream mouths contain alluvium—sands, gravels and silts laid down by rivers—while slopes can be mantled by head deposits formed by downslope movement of weathered material, especially under periglacial conditions during colder phases of the Quaternary. Landslip and colluvial deposits accumulate where clay-rich mudstones fail along slip planes, sometimes triggered by coastal erosion or heavy rainfall. These superficial materials can mask bedrock locally, but they also help explain why some parts of the Watchet coast are easier to access than others, why fresh fossil-bearing falls can appear after storms, and why cliff management is a continuing issue in a town built right at the edge of a rapidly changing shoreline.
The same geology has also shaped local building traditions across Somerset. The thin-bedded limestones of the Blue Lias, and the finer, pale limestones traditionally called White Lias in parts of the region, have been widely used as building and walling stones, valued for their ability to split into slabs and blocks but also known for characteristic weathering patterns. While Watchet’s coastal cliffs are best known to geologists for their boundary stratigraphy, fossils and structures, they sit within a county-wide story in which the Mesozoic rocks have long supplied practical materials for construction, lime and flooring. In that sense, Watchet’s geology is both globally significant in stratigraphic terms and locally influential in the everyday fabric of the built environment.
Taken together, the geology of Watchet is a compact but unusually rich record of change: arid continental mudflats giving way to a rapid marine incursion, shallow lagoons and tidal flats transitioning into fully marine Early Jurassic seas, and all of it later fractured and folded by fault movement and salt-related deformation. Few places offer such accessible exposures of the Triassic–Jurassic transition alongside such vivid structural features and coastal landforms, which is why the Watchet coast remains a classic destination for both fossil hunters and stratigraphers.
SAFETY
Common sense when collecting at all locations should be used and knowledge of tide times is essential. You can easily be cut off by the tide as the sea always reaches parts of the cliff, especially if walking from the harbour at Watchet or from Blue Anchor. The tide comes in very high at these two locations.
In addition, the foreshore at Watchet is subject to periodic thick mud deposits, which submerge much of the rock platforms and render the foreshore quite dangerous to walk on. Warning signs are posted when relevant at the top of the cliff path.
EQUIPMENT
Most fossils can be found by simply searching along the foreshore, they tend to mostly be found loose amongst the shingle. Occasionally fossils can be found in large blocks, so it is ideal to take a hammer and chisel just in case.
ACCESS RIGHTS
This site is an SSSI. This means you can visit the site, but hammering the bedrock is not permitted. For full information about the reasons for the status of the site and restrictions please download the PDF from Natural England – SSSI Information
It is important to follow our ‘Code of Conduct’ when collecting fossils or visiting any site. Please also read our ‘Terms and Conditions‘
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