Welcome to Hook Head.
First a safety warning
Be aware that the cliffs can be slippery. Make sure that you don't have to cross over lower ground to get back as a dangerous situation can emerge out of nowhere. Freak waves can occur out of calm waters. That said the upper parts of the cliffs are quite safe, but do take care.
In order to log this cache you must send a message via the message centre with the answers to the three tasks. They can be found both in the dark shell slope in front of the lighthouse, and in the lose rocks behind the buildings.
1. Find a fossil at Hook Head, describe the colour, what kind of plant or animal you think it is, is it 2 or 3 dimensional, what is the size of the fossil and is it a single fossil or a group of fossils.
2. Do you think it is mainly fossils of things that lived in water or on land at Hook Head and include your reasoning.
3. In the dark cliffs you will also see some bands running through the cliffs, is this fossils or crystals and what colour are they.
Photoes of the fossils you find are very welcome on the cache page, but logs containing the answers or a picture of the bands will be deleted.
I enjoy a good log, they are what make it worth hiding caches.
The shell slope at Hook head was formed in the Lower Carboniferous age from 345 to 310 million years ago.
At that time, the cliffs where being formed as the seabed. When animals and plants died, they fell to the bottom of the sea, and a small percentage got covered by sediments in such a way or part that there wasn't any oxygen present which bacteria and other animals could live from and by that not eat the plant or animal.
Often it takes some time until the remains end up in an oxygen free environment and it is therefor usually only the harder parts which are preserved as bones and scales etc. while softer parts like eyes and skin usually aren't preserved.
Then as time go by the tiny holes in the animal or plant are filled with minerals leaving a stone print of the animal, sometimes there is still some of the original material left, often is it only a print and all of the original material has gone. Often you only find a part of the animal and plant as for instance the spikes of a sea urchin falls of when it dies, and therefor the body and the spikes are often found separately.
Over time the now formed shell slope was forced to the surface by the tectonic movements of the earth, and then the sea started to erode the cliffs bringing the fossils which had long been buried back to the surface where you can find them today.