Derryvree’s Buried Sedge Margin
Derryvree offers unusually direct evidence that this part of Ireland was, at least for a time, not continuously buried beneath ice. The organic silts were laid down in freshwater conditions between episodes that deposited glacier-borne debris. Their plant and animal remains indicate open tundra and a periglacial regime: ground subject to intense frost, seasonal thaw and cold-water sediment movement. This was not a forested Ireland, nor a benign “warm interval” in a modern sense. It was a severe, treeless landscape in which pools, wet hollows and sedge- and moss-rich ground could nevertheless sustain a specialised living community.