Retirement sparked a whole new career for a couple who became fascinated with jewellery with a difference and ended up owning niche shops.

Marie Land - once a Northern Echo journalist before she tunnelled out - was meant to be retired. She lasted precisely three days before she started working in the Gemcraft shop in the Dales Centre in Stanhope.

"I was one of their best customers, always buying jewellery. I just loved all the different stones and minerals. They are absolutely fascinating, each one with a story," she says.

Eventually, like the man in the razor ad, she liked the shop so much, she and husband John bought it.

John managed three days of retirement before he too was working.

"I trained as a chemist and there's a lot of chemistry in the study of these stones," he says.

And by this time they had a shop in Durham too, in Saddler Street on the way up to the Cathedral.

Both shops have items to make your mind boggle. Sitting in the window of the Durham shop is a dinosaur egg from China.

It could be 220 million years old - and still a youngster compared with a Trilobite, a sea creature from Morocco, that dates back over 500 million years. Hard to get your head round.

Easier to understand is the jewellery - amber from Russia and Poland, silver jewellery made by the Navajo Indians, earrings from Mexico which contain a tiny real flower, rings made from dinosaur bones and even a pendant made from a meteorite.

"Jewellery from outer space. How can you not be excited?" says Marie.

Jewellery made from the unusual stones - interesting, different, reasonably priced - is their biggest seller bringing customers back each week. But their customers come from all ages, all backgrounds and all countries.

"It's not unusual to have a couple of small boys sitting on the floor raking through the boxes of sharks' teeth and dinosaur poo while some serious geologists are looking at the fluorspar and geodes, and a couple of students are trying on jewellery.

"We get a real mix in here and they all talk to each other, which is great."

Some of the country's leading geologists are regular customers. And there have been some interesting incidents - like the eminent professor carefully explaining some fossils to a fascinated small boy. Or the time a man came in demanding to know where they had got the dinosaur footprint that was in the window.

It turned out that he was the archaeologist who had discovered it in Wales 30 years earlier. "And that's another thing," says John. "We are always learning. So many of our customers are so knowledgeable that we're constantly learning more. It all makes it so much more fun."

Then there was a fossil in the window that passing students christened Geoffrey. When Geoffrey was finally sold, the new owners realised what they had undertaken - and sent a Christmas card from "Geoffrey".

When they first started in the Stanhope shop, one of the Lands' biggest sellers was fluorspar from the lead mines, and the beautiful spar boxes made by the miners.

"In those days it was cheap and plentiful. Now the mines have closed - apart from one opened up by Americans each year - and it's harder to get. That's one of the reasons we had to widen our scope," says Marie.

Wide indeed. Each year they go to the trade fair in Tucson, Arizona, the biggest in the world.

"Huge, vast, 30 sites all the size of airplane hangars. But the things they have are brilliant, wonderful," she says.

And some unbelievable prices too. One time they w ere there and Microsoft founder Bill Gates came along and bought a crystal geode for $250,000.

John and Marie have some smaller, very beautiful crystal geodes at much more affordable prices.

"But by going to the biggest shows we have amazing choice," says Marie.

Mammoths' tusks from Alaska carved into bracelets, stones from Siberia, Ammolite - a newly discovered sort of opal type substance found coating ammonites, larimar, a delicately coloured pectolite that is found in just one square metre of the Dominican Republic, Whitby jet, Frosterly marble - fossilised limestone from Weardale, and fossil fish from Wyoming,

Their shelves are stacked with beautiful and unusual items from all over the world. Or rather all under the world. And if you think of that meteorite, well from out of it too.

Makes everything else seem so ordinary.

* Gemcraft, Durham Dales Centre, Stanhope, tel: (01388) 526233, and Saddler Street, Durham, tel: 0191 383 1933. Open seven days a week.