Derryvree’s Sedgebank
Archived: 28 September 2026
Thirty thousand five hundred and fourteen BCE is a modern chronological label, not a recorded Irish year. Derryvree, County Fermanagh, preserves freshwater silts and organic deposits between glacial tills, showing a locally ice-free, periglacial wetland during Marine Isotope Stage 3. Its plants, mosses and insects indicate sedgy, Arctic-alpine vegetation and shallow water. Cave finds at Castlepook, County Cork, include mammoth, reindeer, hyena and other cold-climate fauna. A cut-marked reindeer femur may indicate brief human carcass processing, but cannot prove settlement. Subsequent expansion of the British-Irish Ice Sheet destroyed or buried evidence, leaving an unstable, intermittently habitable Late Pleistocene landscape overall.