I’m heading south to Weymouth again today so, by the time this post is published, I’ll hopefully be heading back from my first walk around Lodmoor. Maybe, as I headed to my guesthouse, I’ll have crunched my way along the pebbles at the top of the beach and found more of these Cuttlebones, the shells from inside the Common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis), a type of cephalopod, the class of mollusc that includes the octopus and squid. (The photos here show both sides of the same cuttlebone.)

I first saw cuttlebones when I was a child. My nana, who lived just a couple of houses away from us, used to have a Budgerigar as a pet (she probably had several over the years but they were always called Johnny), and she used to buy cuttlebones to put in the cage. Budgies, and possibly other caged birds, gnaw on the bone to get the calcium and other minerals they need.