Awbeg’s Deep Cave Record
Modern reconstructions show that the British–Irish Ice Sheet grew rapidly after about 32,000 years before present, although its expansion was not simultaneous in every region. At its greatest extent, broadly between 27,000 and 23,000 calibrated years before present, ice covered Ireland and reached well beyond today’s coast in several directions. The year represented here therefore lies near a threshold rather than in a settled climatic state: it was part of the long descent into the Last Glacial Maximum, not a moment when all of Ireland can simply be pictured beneath ice.