The cliffs at Annestown Beach in County Waterford, which are part of the 25 kilometre stretch of the Copper Coast Geopark, are Ordovician in age. This is a very early period of land formation dating from between 460 to 450 million years ago when a volcano on the seabed near to the South Pole erupted with a violent explosion that forced a mixture of ashes, rock fragments and debris through the water to the surface of the ocean and this material fell back on the water to settle on the seabed. Molten lava in the form of rhyolite was also extruded to join this layer of volcanic debris. Through almost unimaginable periods of time, this layer consolidated to form rock, was moved along with the tectonic plate on which it rested to its present position in the northern hemisphere, and was raised to the surface. Quite a journey and a fantastic story, don’t you think?
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Jessica's Nature Blog 
With the theory of plate tectonics it’s all so much more amazing while at the same time making a lot more sense.
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Amazing – hard for the mind to truly grasp such periods of time.
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How amazing was the person who first proposed the theory of plate tectonics? It was a considerable time before anyone took the idea seriously. The coming together and the drifting apart of the crustal plates accounts for so many strange “anomalies” – like the rocks in parts of Nova Scotia being the same as rocks on the coast of Africa because the original plate tore apart leaving identical halves in both continents.
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It’s fantastic how it was possible to see so many rock exposures from so many periods of geological time in such a short visit to Ireland: from the Ordovician volcanics of the Copper Coast in County Waterford, to the Devonian/Carboniferous mudstones and sandstones near Cork, the Carboniferous limestones in The Burren, and the Devonian intrusive granites of Connemara.
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The development of the theory is covered brilliantly and amusingly by Bill Bryson in A Short History Of Nearly Everything, Chapter 12 The Earth Moves. Amazingly, it was only in the 1960’s that it was really accepted as orthodoxy. Brilliant book.
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Thanks, Aidy. I must look that up. I knew that it was a good story but didn’t recall the details when I made the earlier comment about plate tectonics.
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