UNESCO Geopark
Explore the English Riviera’s 400 million year history and see the UK’s first resort in a different light!
You will discover a landscape untouched by glaciation, revealing stories unseen elsewhere in the world.
Stories of tropical seas and scorching deserts, raised beaches and drowned forests, hippopotami and mammoth, straight-tusked elephant and sabre-toothed tiger, cave bear and earliest man.
Geological processes have been operating from the beginning of the Earth’s history, creating the beautiful English Riviera landscape and coastline we see today, from the striking limestone headlands to the rich red soils and cliff faces. The English Riviera Geopark aims to show you our resort in a way that you have never seen it before and to understand our dynamic planet and how it has shaped our local environment. We are now part of a family of 50 UNESCO Global Geoparks and UNESCO’s ONLY urban Geopark. Visit www.englishrivierageopark.org.uk for further information.
Below are three sites to visit in order to understand the fascinating geological story of the English Riviera and to discover that our nation’s first human visitors settled on these shores as hunter-gatherers around half a million years ago.
Berry Head
The Devonian Period - 417 to 354 million years ago
Visit Berry Head National Nature Reserve and you will be standing 60m (200ft) above sea level on the remains of a massive coral reef. This reef formed at a time in the Earth’s history around 400 million years ago when, thanks to the movement of continental plates, our landscape was a few degrees south of the Equator. As a result the sea was warm, tropically warm, and primitive corals were able to thrive, along with many other creatures that are now extinct such as trilobites and ammonites.
View the Bay’s geology and birdlife from the best vantage point – the sea - on Torbay Coast and Countryside Trust’s Coral Coast Cruises. They run weekly from Paignton Harbour on Thursdays throughout August.
Babbacombe Downs
Mountain Building Era - 300 million years ago
On a local scale this major episode in the Earth’s history had a fundamental effect on the rocks of Torbay. Sediments were folded and fractured as they were crumpled and pushed northwards by the collision and on Babbacombe Downs the pressure was so great that a large fold was turned over on itself literally turning the sediments upside down. The dark slates at the bottom of the cliff are actually younger than the pale limestones of the Downs at the top!
Goodrington
The Permian Period - 290 to248 million years ago
Here in the middle of the horseshoe bay that shapes the English Riviera, the land is made of the softer red sandstones which erode far more easily. Travel back 280 million years and you would be in the sweltering intense heat of an arid desert that covered most of Britain and Europe. Very little seems to have been able to survive in these Permian deserts, although between Goodrington and Saltern Cove strange fossilised burrows up to 10 cm across, in the stony deposits, may have been the homes of giant centipede-like creatures.
Kents Cavern
The Quaternary - 1.8 million years ago to date
Just imagine the English Riviera echoing to the sounds of saber-toothed cat and mammoth, whilst in the caves, sounds of early man would have been all around you.
Dating of bones and worked flint tools discovered in Kents Cavern provides evidence that the caves were home to Britain's first humans. A jawbone found in the cave is 38-40,000 years old; however, some flint handaxes from the caves date at over 500,000 years old and were made by a much earlier species of human.
The rock that forms this cave system is Devonian limestone, shaped into caverns with stalagmites and stalactites formed by an underground river about 2 million years ago.
