Birm-166’s Tundra Pools
Archived: 27 September 2026
At 30,599 BCE, Ireland cannot be described through a precise historical event. Derryvree, County Fermanagh, preserves a freshwater wetland between glacial tills, radiocarbon-dated broadly to 36,900–31,700 years before present. Its fossils show treeless, periglacial tundra with pools, sedges, mosses and cold-adapted plants. The deposit demonstrates local ice-free conditions during unstable Marine Isotope Stage 3, not an island-wide landscape. Cave remains indicate intermittent mammals, including mammoth, reindeer and hyaena, but their contexts are fragmentary. A possibly tool-marked reindeer bone suggests human visits, yet secure evidence for people, settlement or society is absent. Later glaciation preserved and destroyed this rare, local record.