The Doneraile Tundra
At this date Ireland was not the wooded, temperate island familiar today. It belonged to a northern Atlantic world repeatedly reshaped by cold, changing sea levels, snowfields, frozen ground and advancing ice. The great expansion of the British–Irish Ice Sheet lay ahead: the best large-scale reconstruction places its maximum volume at about 23,000 years ago, while Irish evidence shows that ice cover and its limits varied substantially from region to region. Consequently, 31,916 BCE should not be pictured as a moment when all Ireland lay sealed under one uniform ice sheet. It was instead part of a long pre-maximum cold phase in which habitats could alter dramatically over centuries and millennia.