A beginner's guide to fossil hunting in Britain

Fossil hunting is mostly walking slowly and looking closely. You are not usually digging; on almost every good British site the fossils are already loose on the beach, having weathered out of the cliffs and been washed clean by the sea. The skill is in learning to recognise them among several million pebbles.

That is good news for a first trip. You need no specialist equipment and no permission on a public beach, and the most productive technique — searching the shingle on a falling tide — is also the safest.

Pick somewhere with three qualities: a beach rather than a cliff face, a regular supply of fresh material, and someone nearby who can identify what you have found.

• Charmouth in Dorset — a heritage centre on the beach, guided walks and reliable ammonites
• Runswick Bay in Yorkshire — sheltered, sandy and full of ammonite nodules
• Bracklesham Bay in Sussex — no cliffs at all, and shark teeth in the shingle

Avoid landslip sites, quarries and remote foreshores until you have a few trips behind you.

Two things matter more than anything else: the tide and the weather that came before. Plan to arrive two hours before low water so you are working a falling tide with the beach opening up in front of you. And go after a storm — rough seas strip the shingle, cut into the cliffs and deliver new material.

Winter is the fossil hunter's season in Britain. The beaches are emptier, the weather does the work, and the light is low enough to pick out shapes in the shingle.

Two or three hours on one short stretch of beach, moving slowly, with your eyes a metre or two ahead of your feet. Most people find fragments before they find anything whole: a section of ammonite rib, half a belemnite, a shell cast in stone.

That is a good result. Fragments teach you what the material looks like — the colour, the weight, the texture — and whole specimens follow once your eye has adjusted.

Take loose material from the foreshore. Leave fossils that are in the cliffs or set into bedrock, both because removing them damages the site and because the cliffs are dangerous. Some coasts have formal collecting codes — West Dorset and Scotland in particular — and many sites are designated SSSIs where hammering is not permitted.

If you find something that looks significant, particularly articulated bone, photograph it, note where it is and contact the local museum. Some of the most important British fossils were found by amateurs who reported them.