Today’s dinosaurs in Bedfordshire are digging up the seabed that their flesh-and-blood forebears paddled over a hundred million years ago. The metal arms of liberating machine bodies have brought up the sands of prehistoric beaches to flow free for the first time, after aeons of compression. The loosened sands have settled – for now – in two great conical mounds looking like orange tumuli, where living creatures once more make an impression. A trail of rabbit footprints scrabbles all the way up to the top of one. Bunny king of the sandcastle!
In this shapeshifting part of the quarry, nothing is fixed, not even the flat ground under our feet. The scatter of ironstone fragments, looking like bits of broken tiles, and biscuit-coloured knobbly stones that we might kick without thinking, are remnants of a mid-Victorian gold rush, when an army of picks and shovels scalped the earth in a thin band stretching between Buckinghamshire and the Norfolk border.
