Cheswick Beach

Northumberland is rightly known for its amazing, and often almost empty beaches, but there are also some beaches where you can see some weird and wonderful bits of geology and paleontology within a few hundred meters of each other.

Cheswick Beach just south of Berwick Upon Tweed is just such a place. Millions of years of history is on display, but only if you know where to look and what to look out for.

The majority of the rocks that are visible here date back around 330-350 million years to the Carboniferous Period. At this point the area was actually located near the equator and had a tropical climate. The waters around would have been full of early life such as Sea Lilies, which still survive in tropical seas today and are related to starfish and sea urchins. Sea Lilies, also known as Crinoids, look like underwater flowers, with a stem attaching them to the sea floor and a central disk (Calyx) from which feather like arms extend to catch food.

When they died, they would have become covered in meters of sediment which would solidify into rock over the millennia and turn their calcified remains into fossils. If you look hard enough in the rocks and shells that cover large parts of the beach you may spot some of these fossils.

They resemble ridged tubes or occasionally like small beads with star shaped centres. This gives rise to their local name of St Cuthbert's Beads. Legend has it that St Cuthbert used these fossils as prayer beads and they have been thought to have been able to ward off evil spirits, cure ailments and bring good luck. Numerous other fossils can be seen in the larger rocks on the beach, such as the worm like ones below, if you look closely.

A short walk down the beach at low tide reveals some rocky areas within the sand which appear to have marks resembling cup and ring markings on them. These, however, are not man-made marks, but the product of volcanic mud!

Unlike the more well-known volcanoes with their eruptions of molten lava, these rock formations came about due to layers of mud being trapped beneath rock and getting expelled upwards through cracks by the build up of pressure. These mud volcanoes become fossilised over time and you get the unusual rocks you see on Cheswick Beach.

There are other unusual rock formations around the beach including some well-worn limestone, which would have been used in the nearby Lime Kilns, and some undulating layers of rock that were bent and curved by pressure and movement of the earth's crust.

Cheswick Beach is a great place to visit and kids will love to beach comb for fossils, while the rest of us will no doubt appreciate the isolation you can get here. If you are feeling energetic, you can wander south along Cheswick Beach to Goswick Sands. When the tide is out you can find yourself alone, on a huge beach, with nobody around for miles.