AS a girl, Joy Shellard remembers dancing, joyously, with her family at Dancing Ledge and visiting Tyneham before the villagers were evacuated in the war.

For more than 70 years she and her family have delighted in day trips along the Dorset coast and enjoyed its varied beauty.

That may be a blink of an eye in relation to the Jurassic Coast’s millions of years of history but even in that short space of time, Joy has seen it alter.

Now, as she puts it, ‘approaching second childhood’ she has written an intriguing book called My Jurassic Playground that blends her autobiographical recollections with information and stories about a coast that is now a World Heritage Site.

Informative about its geological past and peppered with ‘facts and fables’ she’s picked up over the years, the charm of this cocktail lies in its mixture of information with memories as the books ambles, westward, chapter by chapter, from Shell Bay to Swanage, Lulworth, Weymouth, Bridport and on to Exmouth.

And she enriches the text with the occasional apt quote from Shelley, Keats, Shakespeare or one of the other English poets.

Joy was brought up at the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth where her father was curator. Being a geologist, too, he would often take the family out on trips to the Dorset coast.

“My first experience of such a trip was going to Lyme in my grandpa’s car,” she recalled. “I must have been four at the time.

“And I can remember going to Tyneham before it was evacuated in the war, parking by the side of the road and walking down to Worbarrow Bay.”

Few villages can have experienced such changes as when the Army took it over in the Second World War.

It was a sad story when the villagers were not allowed to return but Joy pays tribute to the army for being responsible for stopping the wonderful scenery for miles around being ruined by developers.

Since that early visit to Tyneham when she was five, she and her family – including the five Old English sheepdogs they have owned over the years and even a Siamese cat – have been frequent visitors to the beauty spots all along the Dorset coast and beyond.

There have been many books on the fascinating stories and geology of the Jurassic Coast but the personal anecdotes and observations make Joy Shellard’s book special.

“St Albans Head was our favourite spot – and that too has altered so much over the years through cliff falls,” she said.

The family would go there via Worth Matravers – one of the prettiest of Dorset villages with its lovely duckpond.

“All the cameras are rapidly pulled out of their cases and there is an orgy of clicks as the photo-shoot begins. We do this every year,” she confesses in the book.

And, typifying the style of My Jurassic Coast (Natula £18.95) she explains how the village got its name, detours to the gravestone of cowpox pioneer Benjamin Jesty at the church, meanders off to discuss the quarrying connections with the name of the pub, the Square and Compass… and mentions the drama when a foreign student accompanying them one year, nearly started a heath fire with a dropped match.

At St Albans Head, Joy’s book ambles joyously through mentions of everything from the extraordinary chapel on the headland to the wonderful view, the coastguard cottages and the bugloss wild flower that she was once surprised to encounter.

And she looks back on the day their dog, Yogi, was bitten by an adder and had to be rushed – in her husband’s arms – to a Swanage vet for urgent treatment.

Durdle Door, she observes, “resembles a prehistoric monster sucking up the water”.

And she recalls the day the Siamese cat they then owned caused havoc at Lyme when it got away and bounded up a tree.

“The book is full of strange experiences we’ve had,” said Joy, whose husband was working at Weymouth when they met. (She devotes a chapter to that town she grew to love.) “One thing that impressed me about Weymouth was how small the waves were,” she writes, adding that whenever the family see small waves now they call them ‘Weymouth waves’.

Joy, who lives at Highcliffe, was unsure how to describe her unusual book that is a cocktail of factual local information, anecdotes and recollections of days when sometimes they seemed to have the whole coast to themselves.

What it is is a celebration of a wonder on our doorstep.