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At this broad date Ireland was in the Midlandian, the Irish term for the last glacial period, but it was not yet necessarily the uniformly ice-covered island of popular imagination. The full Last Glacial Maximum came later, broadly after c. 26,000 calibrated years before present, and ice-sheet growth was neither instantaneous nor geographically uniform. Exposure dating of upland landforms has been used to argue that parts of north-central Ireland remained ice-free until at least about 34,000 years ago. Other reconstructions show that the British–Irish Ice Sheet subsequently expanded dramatically, reaching the Atlantic shelf west of Ireland only much later in the glacial cycle.
This point falls within Marine Isotope Stage 3, during the wider Late Pleistocene cold stage conventionally called the Midlandian in Ireland and the Late Devensian in Britain. It preceded the fullest expansion of the last British–Irish Ice Sheet, but it belongs to the long climatic deterioration from which that ice sheet grew. Recent reconstructions show that the build-up, maximum extent and retreat of ice across Ireland and Britain were highly asynchronous: different sectors advanced and retreated at different times. The greatest ice volume in the most recent reconstruction occurred around 23,000 years ago, while some sectors had advanced earlier. That pattern is a warning against imagining a single, uniform moment when all of Ireland suddenly vanished beneath ice.
