A statue to Mary Anning, the 19th-century fossil hunter and palaeontologist who was once lost to history, is set to be unveiled in her home town of Lyme Regis in 2022, after a four-year campaign by a schoolgirl.
She made her discoveries at the Black Ven cliffs on the Jurassic coast, and the campaigners have been granted planning permission to place the bronze in the perfect spot.
Evie Swire was nine years old when she first heard of Anning, who sold fossils to supplement her family's meager income and who is the subject of the film Ammonite. She began the Mary Anning Rocks campaign because she was disappointed that there was no local tribute to her.
The statue of Anning was supposed to be unveiled on the anniversary of her birth in May 2022, but the coronaviruses and disagreements over where to put it looked like they would scuttle the project.
Evie Swire is at Ringstead Bay. SWNS
Evie's mother said that plans to place the statue near the anchor viewpoint on the seafront were resisted, and that the project was added to a long list of applications during the Pandemic. A proposal to put the statue on a cart road below the Marine theatre was also rejected.
We finally have the perfect spot for her, facing Black Ven and Golden Cap. Pearson said that Black Ven is the most evocative place to look out to the sea.
It is the same view as the portrait of Mary that was painted. There is a lot of communication.
At one point I thought the project might be stopped by bureaucratic red tape. I thought the hard part would be getting planning permission.
She said that the local people got behind it.
The statue of Anning and her dog, Tray, will be cast in bronze in early 2022, and will be unveiled in May. The Mary Anning Rocks learning legacy will enable children from underprivileged background across the UK to visit the statue and go fossil hunting on the beaches, discovering the next generation of Mary Ann.
One of the first ichthyosaurus skeletons was found by Anning, and she became an expert in the field of palaeontology. Her finds were often credited to her male buyers. In one surviving letter, she wrote that the world has used her so unkindly that she fears it has made her suspicious of everyone.
She was 47 years old.
The planning application papers said that Anning's finds changed the way scientists thought about the origins of our planet and how life evolved on it.
Mary Anning has been erased from the historic archives due to her being an uneducated, working-class woman and an outsider to the polite and scientific community.
She was not known about in the town. A statue of her would have been raised over a hundred years ago if she had been male and upper class.
I think we have finally righted a historic wrong.
