Expert's tip

Lyme Regis and Charmouth, Dorset

This is one of the safest and most accessible places in the country to hunt for fossils. People can just walk along the beach with a bucket and a keen eye and find all sorts of specimens from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Most are just lying loose among the pebbles, and include ammonites, belemites, crinoids and bones of the ichthyosaur, a giant marine reptile. The most exciting discovery here was in 2000 when someone found the fossilised skeleton of an entire dinosaur - a scelidosaurus. There's a plaster cast of it at the Charmouth Heritage Centre.

Next weekend we're expecting thousands of people to attend the annual Evolution Rocks! festival. There will be fossil hunts, children's activities, talks and performance artists. Most events are free, and there'll be a free shuttle service between Lyme Regis and Charmouth - although at low tide in the morning you can walk along the beach between the two.

• evolutionrocks.net.

Meirel Whaites, senior warden at Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre

Readers' tips

Southerndown Beach, Glamorgan

Southerndown has everything you could possibly wish for in a beach: beautiful rockpools, fantastic surf, eye-catching sand and even stunning fossils (including ammonites and "devils toenails"). A truly incredible beach.

• South Wales coast, near Bridgend. M4 Junction 35. (Between Porthcawl and Barry Island).

Tom4king

Filey, North Yorkshire

Stretching from Bempton and Speeton at the south, to the rocky outcrop of Filey Brigg at the north, the five-mile beach of clean golden sand at Filey is peaceful and unspoilt. There are fossils in the cliffs, a foreshore that extends a long way out at low tide, and rock pools on the Brigg. Filey is within easy reach of the North York Moors, Scarborough, Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay.

Sandlover