The movement of the Earth's plates caused further continental collisions as we made our journey north.

And the result of this was the formation of a supercontinent called Pangea 248 million years ago.

The name mean “all earth” and this enormous land mass formed a single continental block that spanned the equator.

Instead of being the island we are today, Ireland was landlocked within the vast continental interior of Pangea.

In fact, we were right in the centre of it.

Once again Ireland baked under a hot desert climate and we were positioned on a line of latitude equivalent to where the Sahara desert sits today.

The plate tectonic activity which formed Pangea had a big effect on Northern Ireland.

When super continents form, sea levels fall.

In this case, it happened on a dramatic scale with the sea levels falling by as much as 100m.

So the warm seas that had washed over us disappeared.

In conjunction with the Saharan climate, the result was what you might expect: we became desert again.

As temperatures rose, a landscape like the rocky deserts of present-day Yemen and Saudi Arabia developed.

These kinds of conditions broadly lasted through what were termed the Permian and Triassic periods.

Evidence for this can be seen in the New Red Sandstone here at Scrabo Hill above Newtownards in County Down.

During our first desert period flash flooding carried freshly eroded sediment to the desert plains where it formed sandstone, this time it was different.

We were much further away from the source of the sediment, so the main carrier was not water, but wind.

It was wind-borne sand which formed giant desert dunes and over time these compacted into sandstone.

And it is this which can be found here at Scrabo Hill above Newtownards in County Down.

This Scrabo sandstone is highly porous and would later become an important water-bearing conduit for the Lagan Valley area around Belfast.