CHARMOUTH went fossil fantastic over the bank holiday weekend for their first Fossil Festival.

The weekend in celebration of rocks and fossils saw more than 2,400 visitors, making around 300 fossil moulds and polishing 200 ammonite slices.

The free events at the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre and in a beach marquee also included fossil hunting walks, the Rocky Fossil Show and a chance to meet local fossil collectors.

The centre's senior warden Meirel Whaites said: "It went brilliantly. We usually expect bank holiday to be busy anyway but compared with the numbers last year for this weekend, we were way up this year.

"It was very successful - everyone had a nice time and there were very nice comments from people."

Ms Whaites said one of the highlights was the meet the collectors day on Saturday. "The local collectors really did pull out all the stops," she said. "The specimens they brought were out of this world - better quality than you would see in some museums. It was the fist time people had seen the specimens because they were the collectors' private collections.

"The biggest highlight overall was that there were so many people here and they went away with a buzz and enthusiasm for fossils, which was the whole point of the event."

The event was held to compensate for the cancelled Lyme Regis Fossil Festival, which takes place over the May bank holiday. Ms Whiates said: "We usually work with the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival so when we heard in March that it wasn't going to run this year, rather than nothing going on at all, we wanted to keep the continuum going for people until next year and provide something for people coming down for the bank holiday."

But it was so successful, the centre is hoping to hold another festival in future, possibly in the summer or October half term.

The heritage coast centre run events on a regular basis and a fossil roadshow in the summer. For more information visit their website at www.charmouth.org