Qualla: English Riviera Geopark https://qualla.com/english-riviera-geopark en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:11 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/v/q/english-riviera-geopark-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: English Riviera Geopark https://qualla.com/english-riviera-geopark English Riviera Geopark: Introduction https://qualla.com/english-riviera-geopark/ Photo credit Sophie means wisdom, CC BY-SA 3.0. The word Devonian, the name of an entire geological period stretching back roughly 400 million years, comes from rocks in Devon. More specifically, it comes from shell deposits at Lummaton Quarry on the edge of Torquay. The English Riviera Geopark sits on a stretch of coast where the deep time underneath the towns is so varied, so well exposed, and so well understood that UNESCO recognised the whole thing as a Global Geopark in 2007. There are over 240 such Geoparks worldwide, ten in the United Kingdom, and only two of those are urban. This is one. Children eat ice cream on stromatoporoid reefs that grew when the area lay south of the equator. The desert that was Roundham Head crossed Yorkshire too. The story is everywhere; you just have to know what you are looking at.

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Image: Sophie means wisdom | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/v/q/english-riviera-geopark-wp/gbvq-english-riviera-geopark-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full English Riviera Geopark: The Tropical Sea That Was Devon https://qualla.com/english-riviera-geopark/ Photo credit Sophie means wisdom, CC BY-SA 3.0. The oldest rocks in the Geopark were laid down during the Devonian period, when the area sat south of the equator in a warm, life-rich shallow sea not unlike today's Caribbean. The Torbay limestones and sandstones come from that water, with volcanic ash layers in the mix from eru...

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Image: Sophie means wisdom | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/v/q/english-riviera-geopark-wp/gbvq-english-riviera-geopark-the-tropical-sea-that-was-devon.mp3 0:06 2 full English Riviera Geopark: Mountains Rise and Tilt the World https://qualla.com/english-riviera-geopark/ Photo credit Sophie means wisdom, CC BY-SA 3.0. During the Carboniferous period the Devonian limestones and sandstones were forced upward by the Variscan Orogeny, a mountain-building event that affected what are now Devon, Cornwall, and the granites of Dartmoor, but which also stretched east to what is now the Czech Republic a...

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Image: Sophie means wisdom | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/v/q/english-riviera-geopark-wp/gbvq-english-riviera-geopark-mountains-rise-and-tilt-the-world.mp3 0:06 3 full English Riviera Geopark: The Desert at Roundham Head https://qualla.com/english-riviera-geopark/ Photo credit Sophie means wisdom, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around 280 million years ago, in the Permian, continental collision had pulled Torbay into the centre of the supercontinent Pangaea, into the middle of a vast desert at a similar latitude to the modern Sahara. That desert is preserved here in two distinct forms. Fine, wind-blown ...

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Image: Sophie means wisdom | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/v/q/english-riviera-geopark-wp/gbvq-english-riviera-geopark-the-desert-at-roundham-head.mp3 0:06 4 full English Riviera Geopark: Caves, Gold, and Lost Eras https://qualla.com/english-riviera-geopark/ Photo credit Sophie means wisdom, CC BY-SA 3.0. Through the Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary periods, sediments may have been deposited over the Geopark, but later erosion has stripped them away, leaving no trace. Events elsewhere left fingerprints: the collision of Africa and Europe that built the Alps also propag...

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Image: Sophie means wisdom | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/v/q/english-riviera-geopark-wp/gbvq-english-riviera-geopark-caves-gold-and-lost-eras.mp3 0:06 5 full English Riviera Geopark: A Geology Tour With Ice Cream https://qualla.com/english-riviera-geopark/ Photo credit Paul Hutchinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. What makes Torbay extraordinary is not any one fact about its rocks, but the density of facts. Walk a few hundred metres along a single beach and you cross hundreds of millions of years. Babbacombe to Anstey's Cove gives you the Variscan upheaval and the largest outcrop of igneou...

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Image: Paul Hutchinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/b/v/q/english-riviera-geopark-wp/gbvq-english-riviera-geopark-a-geology-tour-with-ice-cream.mp3 0:06 6 full