The cliffs of West Bay are internationally famous from playing a starring role in TV drama Broadchurch - but have you ever wondered why they are golden?
The mighty sandstone of the Dorset resort's iconic East Cliffs makes them instantly recognisable and they can be seen from well afar.
They were part of the famous opening scenes of Broadchurch, in which an 11-year-old boy's body is found on the beach below.
Local police officers DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) and DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant) are then called in to investigate.
But how do these famous golden cliffs get their colour?
It's because they're made up of Bridport Sand.
These crumbly golden cliffs reveal ancient sea levels from 175 million years ago; the horizontal banded layers are formed by harder and softer deposits of Bridport Sand, with each metre of cliff taking 20,000 years to form.
And at about 43 metres high that means that when you look at the cliffs you are looking at an 860,000 year chunk of time.
These cliffs are known as the Golden Gateway to the Jurassic Coast.
The Bridport Sand formation is Toarcian, an age or stage in the early Jurassic. The sequence is cyclical with the cycles becoming closer at the top of the cliff.
This is the youngest formation of the Lower Jurassic Lias Group. It extends from the Dorset coast to the central Cotswolds.
The sands were originally porous and permeable throughout but, during burial, shelly fossils were dissolved and the calcium carbonate precipitated in layers, creating hard, dense, sandstones. These have been used locally as building material.
While these cliffs may look magnificent, they are extremely dangerous and prone to regular landslips.
The crumbling cliffs have have concerned people locally for a long time. There are newspaper reports from the Victorian era onwards of landslides.
