Ballinlough Fields and the Japanese Gardens During spring, Instagram photographers and any admirer of beautiful things visit the Japanese Gardens in Ballinlough to appreciate the vibrant pink cherry blossom as it flowers. While this beautiful phenomenon can only be observed once a year, an extensive and interesting limestone cliff in this area can be observed year-round.
The main limestone cliff face at the Japanese Gardens in Ballinlough.
The cliff can be found behind the cherry blossom at the north-western corner of the park, below a row of houses sitting on the top of the cliff. This outcrop shows many of the characteristics of the limestone layers in Cork. As such, if you want to explore all the beautiful features and structures that the limestone layers of Cork have to offer, then this location is ideal. The limestone here is also crinoidal meaning it is made of fossils of crinoids (see‘Cork during the Carboniferous Period’). That being said, you can also spot beautiful shells and coral fossils, and the preservation of tiny details in these can be remarkable. To most people, crinoids may look like plants and are, funnily enough, referred to as sea lilies. But they are very much animals, something that becomes more apparent if you search for videos of ‘swimming crinoids’. As you might have guessed by the use of present tense here, crinoids very much exist today. However, they were much more numerous and diverse during the Carboniferous Period. Looking in the Carboniferous limestones, you see them everywhere, little circles and square disks in all sorts of sizes spread across the rock, sometimes still attached to each other. These pieces are part of the stalks that the crinoids used to cling to the seafloor and possibly other surfaces in the coral reefs at the time .
17
Powered by FlippingBook