Collecting and fossil hunting in the Dordogne
How it all started ...
From a very young age I have always enjoyed visiting France, as I knew I would get to go down some caves and afterwards we would exit through the gift shop, as you always do and I would get to fleece my parents (still doing it) part with there hard earned cash to buy beautiful semi-precious gemstones and ancient fossils (neither of which actually cam from France)! Not that I really knew any difference at the time. However, it was a hobby and interest that one of my friends also shared, so we collected together. I then left England for Scotland at the age of 17 and my collection remained in storage every since. Over the years, with my collection in storage out of sight and out of mind, interest slowly dwindled, my small collection was all boxed up and much more important hobbies and interests, such as ladies, who came and went!
Getting back into the fossil collecting game ...
Having now semi-retired and moved to France and living in the limestone rich region of Perigord Blanc (Central Dordogne), one day I spotted an ammonite in our wall and roughly around the same time my mother also found a very large clam type shell in another piece of limestone, I am no expert on the subject, but from the research I have done, I believe it to be a BIVALVE. Photos of our very first two fossil finds in dordogne are shown bellow. I showed both of these fossils to our very inquisitive daughter, who was about 4 or 5 years old at the time and she seemed hooked. From there on she begun searching out and hunting for fossils in all of our limestone walls. She wanted to remove stones from the outbuildings, wherever she spotted a fossil in the wall!
The collection so far ...
First off, I will say that we don't get a chance to get out very often fossil hunting in the Dordogne/Perigord area, so for now this page is a bit of a work in progress, pretty much like my life to be honest.
So here follows some photos with a description of our fossil finds so far ...
From the Garden
Sometimes we have driven for miles for collecting fossils in Dordogne are, yet our best finds to date have been on our own doorstep, in our very own garden.
Ammonite - Although the fossil was found in a limestone wall at the property, the limestone was probably imported from a quarry in the Perigord Blanc region. That said, given the property is over 400 years old, I doubt very much that it came from many miles away.
Bivalve - Likewise my mother found this in a stone pile that was in the barn, potentially this could have came from anywhere in Dordogne.
Rouffignac
Granny and grandad had come to visit us all. We all fancied a nice day out, but we wanted to keep it fairly local, so we visited the Grotte de Rouffignac I will very quickly get start of with my conspiracy theory out of the way first.
A nice little Shell fossil that we found. It actually looks very similar to a small scallop shell. Not that we were concerned about any kind of value, I painted the shell with a hint of water colour paint and then proceeded to varnish it to help it to stand out. This was the first piece of stone I picked up that had fallen from the limestone walls beside the entrance to the cave.
