Revealing Hidden Mysteries on the Dorset Coast

For the collaboration, earth scientist and presenter Anjana Khatwa takes us along Dorset’s Charmouth beach. The path she takes allows her to explore the landscape, revealing hidden mysteries and unearthing stories about ancient life on earth.

When Anjana Khatwa was 12, she saw something that would change her life. The earth scientist and presenter was travelling in Kenya when the family she was with decided to pull over at some ancient lava flows in the Tsavo West National Park to stretch their legs. “It looked like a sea of blackness, just jagged rocks all over the landscape,” she recalls, sitting at home in Studland, Dorset. “I remember thinking, these rocks used to be lava. If they were molten, I wouldn’t be standing here, because I would have melted away. This is actually what the Earth is like. At that moment, I just knew that’s what I wanted to study.”

12-year-old Anjana picked up two small pieces of rock from the lava flow that day and pocketed them. She’s 49 now, and she’s been collecting rocks ever since; you can see them lined up neatly on the shelves behind her desk, which is usually covered in them too.

For Anjana, rocks tell tales that we’ve forgotten how to hear. She picks up a piece of Welsh slate, “when I hold this in my hand I just have this incredible story of two continents colliding, completely closing up an ancient seabed, taking those ancient mudstones and changing them to a brand new rock through pressure. They're alive with stories. But I think there's such a barrier for people to understand those stories.”

It’s something that’s always been part of Anjana’s heritage: a second-generation immigrant raised in Slough, she describes herself as “being Rajasthani, having Indian heritage, being raised as a Hindu but also mixing into that a very strong Kenyan identity”. Anjana says she’s “never felt disconnected from nature”; at home, her mother’s temple included a rock which had been blessed. “I’ve always grown up with that sensibility that everything around us is part of a greater creation that is imbued with spirituality and is alive in the way it can help us understand ourselves.”

Still, it took a new kind of exploration to inspire Anjana to share this understanding with others. Until five years ago, she said she was “stagnating”: “To live in such a beautiful place is a huge privilege. But also, as a person of colour, it can be very isolating.”

But when Anjana connected with educator Dr Geeta Ludhra and joined her Dadima’s walks for South Asian women, it offered her a new way of life. “When I started to walk with these other women, I began to see the world through their eyes. There was an absolute shift in my mind of: I exist in these two places. I'm an earth scientist, and I can talk about the science of the landscape, and I also connect with the women because we come from the same cultural backgrounds. When those two parts of me came together, that's when suddenly there's this like fire that lit inside me.”

This combination led to Whispers of Rock, Anjana’s groundbreaking book (published in 2025) that combines her scientific knowledge with indigenous stories of nature from around the world. She’s hoping, she says, to invite the reader to “step into a different world, where you begin to understand all of these different ways of knowing about the world around us. My hope is that it just kind of opens your heart and your mind as to how alive rocks are with stories.”

“Last year, I revisited a site where I went as a kid in the eighties,” she tells me. “And the minute I walked over those lava flows I felt like they were welcoming me back home. I had picked up that rock as a kid with a dream, and I was still holding it but as a woman who had achieved what she had set out to do. I promised myself, and I promised the rocks, that I’d go and tell their story, and I had come back and completed that circle. It was an incredibly powerful moment.”

Anjana wears the TOAST Abstract Hand Embroidered Gilet, Dash Stripe Cotton Shirt, Suki Wool Cotton Seersucker Trousers and Flower Mountain Yamano Kaiso Panelled Trainers.

Words by Alice Vincent.

Photography by Marco Kesseler.