Elephant Hall’s Reindeer World
Ireland lay within Marine Isotope Stage 3, a long, climatically unstable part of the Late Pleistocene. It was not yet the familiar wooded and maritime island of later prehistory. Nor should it be pictured simply as an unbroken white ice cap. The Last Glacial Maximum, when the British–Irish Ice Sheet covered Ireland and extended across much of its continental shelf, came later, broadly around 27,000–23,000 cal BP. Before that maximum, ice sheets repeatedly grew, shifted and retreated; their margins and thickness varied greatly by region.