Archaeology unearthed by storms

Poor Uncle Tom

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irelands-storms-unearths-6000-year-old-dwellings-near-galway-240026291-240125091.html


The recent storms that battered Ireland's countryside and coastlines unearthed a hidden gem amidst the devastation to properties and landscape.

The storms have exposed evidence of life dating back to the Neolithic period on Connemara’s Omey island. Large linear archaeological deposits of up to a meter thick have been exposed on the western and northern shorelines of the tidal island off Claddaghduff.

The Irish Times reports two sets of medieval burial sites, traces of sunken dwellings and parts of a Neolithic bog which had been covered over for millennia by shifting sands, have been revealed.

Clifden-based archaeologist Michael Gibbons has classified the weather impact on Omey as “spectacular,” but says that many important archaeological features, such as midden deposits, have been destroyed along the Atlantic rim in the “severe beating of Connacht’s coastal dunes” since mid-December.

Out on Omey in recent days, as winds and swell began to ease, Mr Gibbons confirmed that sand-cliff sections up to 100 meters long had revealed the archaeological deposits.

The burial sites now visible were part of a medieval settlement excavated in the 1990s by Prof Tadhg O’Keeffe of University College Dublin, when an earlier storm revealed traces of a monastic enclosure, he said.

The sunken houses, of which there are traces, date from the 18th and 19th centuries, while the churning up of an ancient bog by recent tidal surges has turned blue sea to brown. Mr Gibbons estimates the bog, at the base of the sand cliffs, to be at least 6,000 years old.

Twenty meters of sand was dislodged in the swell on the northwest, while the sea came right up to the gate of the new graveyard. “We haven’t had tides this high since 1991 and previous to that in 1963, and it was the series of tides that really made an impact, affecting all of the islands.”

Cromwell’s Fort on Inishbofin was hit, according to Mary Lavelle of D’Arcy’s Orchard on the island’s east end. “On the same night that we lost the harbor light, a lump was taken out of the fort on the harbor side,”she told The Irish Times.

On neighboring Inishark, which the last 24 residents were forced to quit in October 1960, there was evidence that the graveyard close to shoreline was damaged, Ms Lavelle said.

In the Ballyconneely area of Connemara, the “bawn wall,” or enclosure around Bunowen castle, was undermined by the sea swell. Bawnmore is best known as a former home of Grace O’Malley, who married Dónal an Chogaidh O’Flaherty there in 1546.

More evidence that we are only passing through, but I think we are leaving far greater scars on the landscape than all of our ancestors combined.

pueblo

Interesting, and it's not just us.

Similar happenings with a Neolithic age forest discovered in Wales..

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-weather-storms-expose-ancient-forests-along-the-coast-of-cornwall-9142719.html

dublinviking

The main question is: how much has been taken away by the storms in last 10.000 years. Irish coastal erosion is constant feature and what happened recently is just extreme example of what is happening every day. Considering that people always mostly lived on the coast, and that today's coast line was in neolithic times probably meters if not miles away from what was then coast, i wander what neolithic Ireland actually looked like. How many promontory forts were not in fact promontory when they were built...

I have been walking the Bray head walk for last 20 years. The coast line in some parts of the walk near Greystones has moved at least 100 meters inland since i did the walk for the first time. This happened in only 20 pretty uneventful years from the climate point of view...

Poor Uncle Tom

I see areas like that on the south coast as well.

There is one area I know of, where the ordnance survey map from 1921 shows a farm house, farm yard, out buildings, stables, etc., and paddocks between those and the beach.

Right now all that is left of all those is a concrete pier on the beach which was on the original land side of the entire farmyard complex.

Given that:
1. the beaches are all made up of the ground up shells of sea creatures,
2. top soils are made up of the bio-degrading materials of past plant and animal life,
3. live plants feed off the nutrients of past generations of biological life,
4. human and other animal species feed of the remains of other biological life,
5. water is a source of energy, continuously cycling forms and feeding life,

How does it feel to be existing on a rubbish tip?

it's all part of the cycle of life and all that....