The Derryvree Drumlin Archive
31,891 BCE is not a year that can be recovered from Ireland’s evidence in the way that a medieval annal or an excavated settlement can be. It is a modern calendar label projected deep into the Late Pleistocene. In radiocarbon convention it falls roughly 33,840 years before AD 1950, but neither people nor natural deposits in Ireland can presently be assigned to that individual calendar year. The responsible scale is a range of centuries or millennia. Around this point, Ireland belonged to Marine Isotope Stage 3, a fluctuating cold phase of the last glacial cycle, long before the Last Glacial Maximum reached its greatest extent.