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Derryvree was revealed in a road cutting near Maguiresbridge in 1969. Beneath the material that forms a drumlin lay freshwater silts and fine sands, rich enough in organic matter to preserve traces of plants and small animals. Above and below were tills: dense deposits made or reworked by glaciers. The sequence is therefore an unusually direct piece of evidence that, before a later advance of the Irish Ice Sheet, this part of Fermanagh contained open ground and freshwater rather than permanent ice.
Radiocarbon results are not calendar dates until they have been calibrated against changing atmospheric levels of carbon-14. At ages approaching 34,000 years, the resulting calibrated ranges can be broad and sometimes irregular. Moreover, a date obtained from an animal bone identifies when that animal died, not automatically when people handled it. The modern re-dating of faunal material from Castlepook has demonstrated exactly why caution is needed: improved pretreatment methods produced dates thousands of radiocarbon years older than several earlier results. Such revision is not a flaw in archaeology; it is a reminder that the evidence and its chronology are continually tested.
