Dyers Quarry is rich in coral fossilised in its growing position, as well as Late Eifelian limestone.

Hopes Nose features gold and palladium mineral deposits left by hydrothermal fluids, and the area is also important for the study of Quaternary stratigraphy and sea level change.

The limestone was held together by hard sponges known as stromatoporoids - modern corals that we are accustomed to today were yet to evolve, but early corals did thrive alongside crinoids, gastropods, brachiopods, trilobites and goniatites (early relatives of ammonites).

During the Carboniferous period the limestones and sandstones of the Devonian were forced up by the Variscan Orogeny which affected what are now Devon and Cornwall (forming the granites of Dartmoor) and stretched as far as the Czech Republic in the East and North America in the west (although at his point the Atlantic did not exist).

This mountain-building event had a massive effect on the future geopark, tilting sediments and forming the beautiful fold on the island of Ore Stone.

280 million years ago continental collision had brought the geopark into the centre of Pangea and into the middle of a huge desert, at a similar latitude to the modern-day Sahara.