West Runton

The village of West Runton is home to a beautiful Blue Flag beach which is most well-known for the discovery of a Steppe Mammoth skeleton in 1990. As the beach sits on the Deep History Coast, it's an ideal place for fossil hunting and rock pooling.

West Runton is where a Steppe Mammoth skeleton was unearthed in 1990. The remains dated back to the Ice Age and is the most complete skeleton of a Steppe mammoth ever found in the world. The beach is therefore popular for hunting for fossils. You can find out more about this area at the West Runton Discovery Point.

The safest place to look for fossils is around the rockpools and shingly parts of the beach at low tide (please do not dig into or climb the cliffs) when the chalk on the foreshore is exposed. The Cromer Forest-bed is exposed here during scouring tides which is rich in fossils. You may also be lucky enough to find belemnites; small, bullet-shaped fossils from a squid-like animal, over 70 million-years-old.

It’s easy to see the historic geology of the area, with the rainbow of coloured earth layers in the crumbling cliffs. Many millions of years divide the chalk layer from the next – this was a time when the sea was eroding the land. The soft cliffs are ideal for burrowing insects such as the rare rove beetle Bledius filipes; thought to be only known in the UK. Other rare species recorded at West Runton cliffs include the nocturnal cliff comber beetle Nebria livida, found only on soft cliffs in Norfolk and Yorkshire.

Neighbouring West Runton is the quieter beach of East Runton. There is a sandy beach backed by sloping sandstone cliffs and countryside beyond. If you fossil hunt here, you can mainly find belemnites in the foreshore exposures. In the gravel beds, you can often find vertebrate fauna, including carnivores, extinct horses, mammoths and comb-antlered deer. This is considered the best available locality for fossil vertebrates of this age. East Runton is a site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) which prohibits digging into the cliffs or bedrock.

When you’ve finished exploring, you can stop off at the beach cafe for a bite to eat, plus there are plenty of places to stay nearby. Just up the road is The Links, a famous golf course designed around the turn of the 20th century. At the Village Inn, you will find a blue plaque on the wall that recalls a concert played at the now-demolished Pavilion by the punk band the Sex Pistols.