Cork Caves, Fermanagh Silts
This was a time of climatic instability. The great British–Irish Ice Sheet had not yet reached its later maximum extent, but glaciers and ice caps occupied parts of Ireland’s uplands and northern districts. The island was neither uniformly ice-covered nor a mild, settled landscape. Conditions changed markedly over long spans, with cold phases, short-lived ameliorations, advancing ice and areas of exposed ground. Modern reconstructions of the ice sheet underline both the scale of this change and the difficulty of assigning a precise local climate to one numbered BCE year. They show substantial ice growth across the British Isles between about 31,000 and 23,000 years ago, with differing sectors advancing at different times.