A FOSSIL found by 11-year-old William Wright at the Scowles near Clearwell Caves gave a glimpse of a very different world.

William was helping his granddad Ray Wright, owner of Clearwell Caves and the Secret Forest, in the garden when he came across the fossil of the gastropod, a sea snail creature that lived 345 million years ago.

Mr Wright said: "The spiral on the shell is anti-clockwise so it must have lived in the southern hemisphere.

"We found a similar fossil previously and sent it to the British Museum and they explained why it was anti-clockwise.

The caves and the Secret Forest are in a bed of crease limestone formed from the fossilized remains of a huge coral sea very similar to the Great Barrier Reef.

Mr Wright added: "The rocks here are like a huge stone book. Every rock is a page in the book and tells a story.

"What is unusual about this fossil is that the spiral of the shell is anti-clockwise which, according to the geologist at the British Museum, means that this bed of limestone was once below the equator.

"That is very hard to accept but in the caves and Scowle are many examples of vast earth movements because of volcanic pressures hundreds of millions of years ago."