Philip

So the Geopark is a big idea and a big area, from Kylemore Abbey in the west to Ballinrobe Mart in the east.

It takes in the three Great Lakes, Carra, Mask and Corrib, the Mam Turks, the Mam Trasnas, the Partree Mountains and Connemara National Park.

And the big idea is the people, the culture, the language, the farming, the nature and the enterprises that all spring from the geology.

So my first stop was to go underground with a geologist, Benjamin Thebedo, into the pigeonhole cave outside and underneath the village of Cong.

Yes, exactly.

It's a valuable lesson, isn't it, Benjamin, that whatever we do to water in one place can end up having consequences we know not where.

Because for all of our science and for all of our technological advances, we're still not able to map with 100% confidence, are we, what happens to water once it goes underground?

That's really interesting.

And the further you go in, the more the roof starts to sparkle.

Yes.

Shallow tropical waters.

Hundreds of millions of years before there were even dinosaurs.

Yes, absolutely.

This existed and formed in this rock that has ended up here.

How does knowing the age of that little bit of rock here, about 50 feet underneath Kong, shape your idea of the landscape above?

It does wreck with your head, though, a little bit, because most of us are really only capable of thinking about this landscape since the glaciers retreated in the course of 10,000, 13,000 years as being how Ireland was shaped and formed

But you just come down those 60 or 70 steps into this cave and you think, oh, good Lord, no.

To understand what shaped and formed this country requires a whole different attitude to time.

How does rock formation shape human activity and the people and the culture of this place?

So you will find cattle in an area like this, and you won't find cattle 10, 15 kilometres north of here.