STAND aside Southend and Clacton. Scientists have revealed the original coastal hot-spot - Malvern-on-Sea.

Experts from Herefordshire and Worcestershire Earth Trust have finally shored up theories that the town was once by the sea, after identifying rocks found on the Malvern Hills.

These were identified as a conglomerate formed by different rocks being washed up and deposited against a cliff face and bound together with compressed sand and mud.

All of which confirms that 440 million years ago, the once much higher Malvern Hills would have been coastal. It also means Colwall and Ledbury would have been underwater, possibly as part of an extensive shallow tropical sea.

Peter Oliver, director of the trust based at University College Worcester, said: "This is an exciting discovery. It was always one of the theories but we're now fairly convinced that this is the case.

"We had a visit this week from two eminent palaeontologists, one from the National Museum in Cardiff and the other from Aberystwyth University, both keen to find fossil evidence to confirm what we thought. It seems from the fossils we found that the evidence is pretty much irrefutable but we'll continue to look for more."

Much of the evidence relies on the identification of the fossil, called graptolite.

One of the specialists, Dr Dennis Bates, said: "It's possible that those found originally by the team from Worcester were just a few of these creatures washed in to the shore and laid down in a very thin layer of mud. To find more would mean splitting the rock in exactly the same timeframe.

"If they were drifting in over many thousands of years, they would be easier to find, but if only for a short time span, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack! It really does bring home to you the amazing timeframe in which we work, where fifty thousand years can be represented by as little as half an inch of compacted sediment."

To find more evidence, Prof Mike Brooks, from the National Museum of Wales, will analyse limestone samples and look for ancient microfossils called conodonts, which would give a precise date for the age of the rocks.