Castlepook’s Fading Fauna
About 33,800 years ago, Ireland was in the Midlandian glacial stage, the Irish expression of the last glacial cycle. It was not yet necessarily the uniformly ice-covered island of the Last Glacial Maximum. Recent ice-sheet syntheses show that the growth, maximum extent and retreat of the British–Irish Ice Sheet were asynchronous: different sectors advanced and later withdrew at different times. Broad reconstructions place substantial build-up after roughly 35,000–32,000 years ago, while maximum ice extent in many sectors came appreciably later, around 27,000–23,000 years ago.