Travel: In the Lyme light

Liz-Anne Bawden is very firm about the role of the museum in Lyme Regis. "It's the communal memory of the town," she says, "and we're lucky to have it." Not half as lucky as Lyme is to have her. Museums all over the country may be marking Museums Week, which starts today, but Lyme Regis is going the whole hog and reopening its spankingly refurbished museum.

Over the past eight years, Liz-Anne, its curator, has led a largely voluntary team with a verve that would have impressed those who first opened its doors in 1921. Pride in the contribution made by volunteers is part of life in small, locally run museums like this one and essential to their funding.

Impressed by local fund-raising and the commitment of West Dorset District Council (which owned the building), the Heritage Lottery Fund came up with pounds 142,000 for Lyme's Philpot Museum and swung ideas of renovation from aspiration to reality. When Sir David Attenborough reopens the museum on Friday, he will be crowning a local effort.

Lyme is a small town, with a population of 3,500, most of whom seem to live on the hill running down to the sea. On the front, it's not difficult to find the Philpot Museum (named after its original benefactor, a rather unpopular former mayor).

The building is an architectural confection, topped with a fancy cupola and situated next to the town's information centre.

Inside, the new design takes full advantage of the sea-front views. As you gaze across to The Cobb, Lyme's landmark harbour wall, you can't help but think of Meryl Streep getting cold and wet in The French Lieutenant's Woman, written by John Fowles in 1969 and filmed in Lyme in 1980.

The town has been much loved by writers for centuries and, appropriately, they form a large group in the museum's introductory roll-call of 28 famous residents and visitors. Among them, Jane Austen looms large; the town plays a key role in Persuasion, published in 1818. Before her, as a young man, Henry Fielding was also much taken with the place and - disastrously - with one of its young ladies.

In the 20th century, artist and glass engraver Lawrence Whistler lived here for 30 years; John Fowles still lives here. And he put in a 10-year stint as the museum's curator before Liz-Anne Bawden.

Fowles's annual reports to the museum committee must be the only collectable examples of this rather rarefied literary genus. You can still buy copies in the museum's welcoming foyer-shop, adding to what fellow Dorset writer and historian Jo Draper calls "the John Fowles factor".

It was Jo Draper who led the cataloguing of the collection (now more than 6,000 objects and photographs) and researched the new displays. On Friday she will also lie a wreath on the grave of Mary Anning, marking the bicentenary of the birth of Lyme's most famous native.

Despite coming from a poor background, Anning is widely regarded as Britain's first female geologist. Born in Lyme in 1799, she soon grew to enjoy hunting for fossils in the limestones and clays of the cliffs that stretch out along the coast on either side of the town.

Mary Anning's family were part of Lyme's long-standing "fossil industry", supplying good-quality specimens to collectors.

As palaeontology developed, random collecting became more specific, and Mary is credited with a number of spectacular finds. The finding of the first Ichthyosaur - which she supposedly uncovered with her brother Joseph at the age of 12 - is now accepted as fable, but in 1824 Mary did find a Plesiosaur and later a Pterodactyl, both of which are now tucked away in the British Museum.

Today the coastline remains a popular source of fossils, and it is not surprising that the Philpot has a fine fossil collection. As you walk through the new and highly accessible galleries, it seems that the ghost of Mary still lingers.

It comes as rather a shock to discover that she was born and first worked in a house on the actual site of the museum.

Lyme Regis Philpot Museum is in Bridge Street, Lyme Regis, Dorset DT7 3QA (01297 443370). Open daily from 10am-5pm April-October and on winter weekends. Admission pounds 1.20 adults, concessions pounds 1, children 50p. The tourist office (01297 442138) also has a useful website:

www.lymeregis.co.uk

An exhibition, "Mary Anning: Her Life, Times and Fossils", opens at the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester (01305 262735), on Friday and runs until 2 September, and Museums Week is from 15-23 May. For more information, contact the Campaign for Museums (0171-233 9796) or the museums hotline (01795 414731). Listings are also at: www.museumsweek.co.uk