Derryvree’s Moss and Silt
Derryvree’s pollen, plant macrofossils, mosses and insects provide a rare view of an Irish landscape before the great expansion of the last British-Irish Ice Sheet. They indicate open tundra or muskeg: wet, treeless ground with pools, sedges, grasses, herbs, mossy margins and low shrubs, rather than the oak, hazel and ash woods familiar from much later Irish prehistory. The evidence points to severe winters, short growing seasons and periglacial conditions in which frost was a major force shaping soil and watercourses.