ABSTRACT
By the time prehistoric man began to take a significant interest in Ireland, the island had developed much of its modern environmental personality, and the prehistory of Ireland can be viewed as the story of how her inhabitants recognized and exploited her environmental potential in soils, rocks and minerals, in flora and fauna, including a harvest of her rivers and the seas around her, and in her position in relation to the European continent. For the greater part of the era described in this book, the environment of Ireland differed significantly in two respects from that of today, however. For before a deterioration which set in about 1000 B.c. the climate was markedly better, with less cloudy and humid Atlantic weather and probably more blue skies, and with summer temperatures averaging two or more degrees Celsius higher. A consequence of this was that the blanket bogs of the west of Ireland (Fig. 2d), a product of a later change to the more humid climate of today, did not then exist, and considerable tracts of fertile soil as rich as any in Co. Meath grew their own attractive vegetation, both herb and woodland, which served to attract pioneer farmers particularly along the north Mayo coast. Both these differences are attested in the large numbers of prehistoric monuments found buried under blanket peat in the west of Ireland, and even more dramatically in the numbers of prehistoric farmsteads which have emerged from this peat in recent turf-cutting, and which were recorded as long ago as 1700 by the Archbishop of Dublin:
’Tis certain Ireland has been better inhabited than it is at present: mountains, that now are covered with boggs, have formerly been plowed; for when you dig five or six foot deep, you discover a proper soil for vegetables, and find it plowed into ridges and furrows . . . (King, in Molyneux 1726, 163)
