Failte 14nov2024

The program is sponsored by Letterfrack Country Shop. The talk given by Michael Gibbons at Connemara Sea Week focused on stone boats, subsea roads, fish traps, and drowned landscapes in Connemara. The talk explored the history and archaeology of the region, including early settlements, artifacts such as stone axes and flint tools, and the impact of rising sea levels on the landscape. The importance of recording and studying these archaeological sites before they are destroyed by storms was highlighted. The talk also mentioned the trading of stone axes by hunter-gatherer groups in the area. This program is kindly sponsored by Letterfrack Country Shop, 095-418-50. This program is kindly sponsored by Letterfrack Country Shop, 095-418-50. Hello, good evening and you're very welcome to the Thursday evening programs here on Connemara Community Radio. We're with you on 87.8 and 106.1 FM and with you this evening right through up until nine o'clock p.m. and I hope you can stay tuned with us for all of our programs. For this evening's recording we are bringing you a talk given by Michael Gibbons as part of Connemara Sea Week which took place in Letterfrack in October and Michael's talk was on stone boats, subsea roads, fish traps and the Connemara Drowned Landscapes. Michael was introduced by Dermot O'Donovan from Connemara Sea Week and from ATU Connemara. So first and foremost, you're very welcome. We're delighted with the turnout. I suppose it's a testament to some of Michael Gibbons' broad appeal, depth of knowledge, expertise that anywhere Michael goes, no matter what the time, day or night, he talks about and so we're really, really delighted to have Michael here today. So without further ado, I would like to welcome Michael Gibbons, a great friend of Connemara Sea Week, a great friend of Connemara and brings a level of depth and awareness to things that most of us walk past and don't see. So Michael is going to open our archaeological eyes for us and give us a new lens and a new world view of the place we live and breathe in. Thanks Michael. Thank you. Dìobh agus Fáil Síochair Díon Connemara, Conn Mac Connemara and the meaning of that name is the Dog Sons of the Sea. So that's the actual name of Connemara. The principal families of the Dog Sons of the Sea were the O'Keele, my mother's family The Conroys, Mac and Marie and the O'Keele, the Conneely family. Bally Conneely is named after them. So it's a very archaic grouping of, but Connemara gets its name from this tribal grouping. There was other Conn Macna families and they lived east of Tuam and on the Mayo-Ross Common border. We ended up with the Conn Macna and the Conn Macna region historically went from roughly Leigh Nairn all the way down as far as Screbe West. The Mount Tork Mountains being the eastern frontier of Connemara. It sort of spread eastwards when the O'Flaherty's took over the area in the 1235. We remember it well because the house of the O'Keele from power, my mother's family. And so we've been in decline ever since. So we've here, this photograph is an important one because we O'Keele week to a wonderful teacher, scholar, Leo Halasey. And my first time on Inish Tork Island, which is just to the north of us here, was on one of Leo's wonderful trips. And we sailed out on the St. Ruck, named after Saul Ruck, lovely little monastic side house hidden in the mountains. And so this is the view of landing on a pilgrimage day on Cahar Island, Cahar Fawric, the fortress of Patrick. And this island fortress has borne a name on it, the Saints Road, which linked the island with Cahar Fawric, for Patrick. And a whole galaxy of stars, St. Bridges, St. Patrick, St. Ciarán, you could go on for a week, travel sub-sea between the mountain and the island. So as well as having actual monuments, we have mythical landscapes associated with our saints, and the very foundations of our Christian culture here. So I'll be touching on some of those. My name is Leonard Menterai, and this is the coast of North Camara. I was lucky enough to be involved in survey work, and have been since I was a kid. And this is Lethergate Beach, Coldfin Beach, over in the lovely mountains of central Camara here. So these are the mantarks looking down across the northern bends here. The earliest settlement we have here goes right back, and our earliest settlements of course were heavily based on the coast, and these are hunter-gatherer groups, and the earliest dated ones we have from this area are from here, on this lovely beach on the So between 6,000 and 7,000 year old hunter-gatherer settlements, pre-farming, and we've now found a whole other series since this site was dated by Queen's University Belfast a number of years ago, along this coastline. So it makes sense, for the first 4,000 years of Camara history, there was no permanent settlement, seasonal nomadic hunter-gatherers migrating along the shore, fishing and hunting and fowling, so birds would have been important as well, hunting the migrating winter birds coming in. Evidence of a very early settlement is very spartan, because there are no monuments, only one monument, and we have one Mesolithic monument, but we have quite a number of these axes. So this is a mudstone, or shale axe, and this came up when I got a phone call one day from John Bobble Jack O'Connella, and John Bobble Jack says to me, Oh, he says, So it was an amazing call I got. He says, I was dredging for clúisne, which are small little scallops, in Coombe Cashin. Coombe Cashin is a very beautiful bay north of Lethermullin, and when he was dredging he found two stone axes in his dredge, and he went on to say that when he was dredging he kept hitting juice-ups, juice-ups of the bog timber, so what he had identified was a drowned prehistoric landscape, dating between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, so really important evidence. He'd stuck them in the side of the wall, and he didn't know where they were, but after 40 years he reached in for a bit of an engine part one day, and pulled out one of the stone axes. So that's it there. So we have these drowned landscapes on the coast, so the sea level rise has risen here very substantially. We also have this lovely find from Lethermullin, it's a flint corn, now flint is as rare as hay and seed, even rarer in Connemara, and this came up as attached to a piece of coralloch, coralloch is the big long weed, or kelp, which was dragged up in a lobster pot just off Lethergesh beach, and it's a piece of worked flint, a coarse, quite a large chunk, very important artifact because flint was one of the key tools that was used in ancient times. So this is from Lethergesh. And we have some deer antler, this is from after the 2014 storms from a lovely little island at Rostydillysk, just on the mouth of Clegan Bay, the big storms that rolled back the Durling stones and revealed an ancient carcass with a midden site embedded in the peat. So this is telling us when we had deer, but we don't know when the deer came. We had deer in the area here for about 6,000 years, we don't seem to have them before that. But it just gives you an idea of the type of material we're turning up on the shore, if you're observant and know what you're looking at. Even if you don't know what you're looking at, this is clearly a deer antler. And of course, we have dated sites. This is from Bundalish, that gorgeous beach facing north onto the mouth of Kill Bay opposite Freetown Island. And you have this fantastic set of intertidal peat with the tree stumps here. This one has two root systems. As this root system here was drowning in the rising bog, it set out a second set of roots to try and stabilise itself, but failed. These have been dated recently by Mick O'Connell and others along the coast to 3,200 BC, roughly. So these are ancient landscapes. This is clear, when these trees were growing, the sea was nowhere near here. The sea was kilometres away at this stage. So the seas have been ridden. So by the Kill Bay, as we look down on it from the village here, there was no bay there 5,000 years ago. It was a valley floor. Maybe it was a little river, tidal river running through it. Another lovely thing, a notched, a lovely notched piece of timber. You can see the notching going on here, a little notch here. How exciting is archaeology? And this was on Lethergesh Beach, again after the big 2014 storms. And next to it was a double line of posts. I knew it was going to get more exciting. So those are actually timber posts. And those posts, I didn't have a trowel with me. I just had my camera and I came back. I'll be back tomorrow. When I came back tomorrow, they were gone. So sometimes when you're on the English Highlands, or like I was out on Omri Island just then, we were looking at the big storm surges. You get a very minimum amount of time to look at these materials. So you have to record them as you're there. If you're waiting around for weeks to get some funding to do it, they'll be gone. So in high energy environments like the north and the west coast of Connemara, and parts of the south, these monuments are being revealed and then destroyed. So we're destroying a page of our history before we get a chance to read it. But it's revealing another page that's out there to be studied yet. So that's the sort of plus and minus of storm surges. This is somewhere we've got some of the very earliest evidence. This is the carob system, hunter-gatherer groups all the way along here. This is the friar's cut, as it's called. The old river went up here and another branch went up here by Minlo. So the La Carob, the Galway city, was a major settlement hub between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Lots of archaeology coming out of the river here. Also further down, there's archaeologist Michael Lynch working in Fenor, and he's found a very interesting complex of sites between Fenor and Doolin. It's called the Doolin Axe Factory, first documented by the Limerick Archaeological Field Club in the 19th century. So the trading axes. So the axe we saw from Le Tumallon has actually been traded by hunter-gatherer groups all around Galway Bay and the outer islands. So we have stone axes from as far west as Inishlacken Island, for example, found in the sand dunes here. We have them from Ormy Island. And we don't have many at all between here and Clegane, which is the biggest concentration of prehistoric sites in County Galway. So the tombs and the artefacts don't often match up. But anyway, this is a very old site. And of course, we have these lovely sites at Clegane, Clegane Farm, Core Tomb, this site is 3,700 years old. It's one of several dozen between Clipton Bay and Leenan, and there's none at all in further south. On the Granites, very, very little. People think I sneak outside late at night building these tombs so that I can report them in the Irish Times the next day. So that is just not true. I just do a lot of fieldwork, as opposed to talking about it, I actually go out and do some of it, unlike some of my colleagues. Anyway, this is a wonderful site on Clifton Bay at Fall. So Fall is the bay between Clifton Bay and Arad Beir. And again, if you're into tidal zone archaeology, you like being wet and muddy and disappointed. A lot of the time. Anyway, this is a rectangular enclosure here. Lockdown was great for field archaeology. Because the guards didn't bother you. I stopped crossing around some bog one day by the yard. They said, where are you going? I said, where do you think I'm going? He said, I'm asking the questions. That was 10 miles outside my zone. I said, I'm socially distancing. Sounds the same, he drove off laughing. Anyway, so the guard here in a rectangular building, possibly Neolithic, way down on the low tidal zone. So that's really interesting. And with it, but may or may not be related, you have a wall. See the wall? So it takes a bit of eye of fate to see some of these, but that's a wall. So that's part of a drowned landscape at the mouth of Clifton Bay. And we have another dated site from Dryna on the Ardbear Peninsula from 6,500 years ago. So again, late Mesolithic, pre-farming, very early days. And then we have other sites. We don't know what date they are. They're sitting in time and space. So floating in time and space, I might add. So this is a really interesting site found by Michael Moylan, he's from Carnagh, and his sister and niece have made some major discoveries on the Carnagh coast there. But this is a rectangular enclosure, as you can see. Lovely site on Letherdeshkirt Hill. Letherdeshkirt is the one area in Climare with a mountain of oral history about it, but nothing at all about this. So this could be a very early rectangular house site. There's big boulders outside it, so it's sheltered from the big swells. It's on the inner part of the inner bay, exactly the type of site we'd expect to find possibly in theolithic house. But it may also be a fish trap. So we don't know. And of course, the big high tides, and the tides are rising. This is Deryne. This is the inner Streamstown Bay. It's one of the sites now in the intertidal zone. I was there one day with an otter swimming around us. I'm glad you didn't have the camera with me. So this site is on the Sky Road. So if you've ever been on the Sky Road, you'll pass this site. It's within 20 yards of the main road. But what you don't see, there's a little mound with it, this is possibly Iron Age. But Streamstown Bay is one of these long sheltered bays at Ballinacill and Plegan with a huge amount of archaeology on it. Very interesting site. Probably marking an Iron Age burial. Though we can't be sure. And one at Ballinacill Bay. Ballinacill Bay is hugely interesting for lots of reasons. And this is on the west side of Ballinacill. So that's Dover. Peninsula is here. There's a big shell midden down here at the end of it. And this is the remains of a stone row. Now luckily, this part of this, one of the big dangers on the coastline was mariculture as it's been developed. And in areas that have never been mapped, you're getting the scraping off the boulder shore to make a smooth path down for trellises and all the rest of it. That can wreck sites. So assessment of these shorelines is kind of, it's required now for nearly everything to do with the shore. For good reason. So this is a line of boulders, possibly Bronze Age in date. So stone alignments are common in this area. They're erected from around 1100 BC onwards. That's a kind of nice one. And this is a more famous one. More complete. This is on the way to Cropathic. So you're moving from westward out to Cro-Forex, that lovely mountain, Holy Mountain. And there's a line of standing stones here. And they're facing a notch in the mountain. And on the 21st of December, the sun sets right into that notch. There's no queue and there's no falsehood around it. Unlike some other famous monuments I could mention in the Boyne Valley, beginning with Ninian. But you also have in the water, this is a salt marsh now. And the salt marsh has a whole complex of standing stones. So this site has been drowned, the whole bay area has been drowned. And we think these dates were around, there's brilliant work done in Cork, West Cork by Billy O'Brien on stone alignments. And they date between 800 and 1100 BC. So that's the date for these, roughly. But anyway, it's part of a ritualised landscape, orientated around this Holy Mountain. And there's lots of things going on, on and around it, and over it, and on top of it. So that's Killadangan. So if you're driving from Westport to Moresk, it's on your right-hand side, you can't miss it. But you can miss it if you're being careful driving, because it's on a very bad bend. But there's public access to it, because we negotiate access into it with the local farmer. Ah, one of our most recent discoveries. Theresa Madden, who's from English Cork, I bumped into her last year, and she said, after that big storm, this is this year, actually, this spring, she said, I think there's an ancient grave exposed on the shore beneath our house, in Fountain Hill, that's on the way to Omi Island. I said, sure, yeah, she said to describe it, I went down, and she was spot on. So this is the remains of a kids' burial, stone box, set into an intertidal piece, with an arc of stones outside. That's really exciting. So I reported to the museum immediately, hoping to get a few Bobs to do some further work. I know we're not interested. Anyway, the site is now gone. It's been swept with the storms since then. So that's a really annoying thing, we don't have a research, or a rescue archaeological unit in the west of Ireland. And though we have made big advances in intertidal zone archaeology in recent years, the CHERISH project was based in Munster, and South Leinster, really, really, CHERISH's council programme, via the Discovery Programme. In the west, we're sort of languishing at the end of a long funding line, and we just don't get it. Anyway, this site is very, very important. It's on the shore, or was on the shore, at Omi Island. Ah, but it doesn't mean there's not finds there. So as sites get destroyed, some of the bigger, heavier artefacts, you'll see them. So this is a really nice one. This is from Morvay. Morvay Beach is, as you go to Ronstone from Ballykinny, it's a lovely little beach down on the right-hand side, getting thrashed with erosion. Now, one of the sites that eroded out was a prehistoric settlement site. And that's a large, broken cornstone, from any date, hard to date them, from 6,000 BC to 2,000 years ago. That's the sort of date range, these artefacts. But there's a whole midden complex that's not in the south. When I first saw it, it was right beside the midden. The next time I went out, it had moved 30 yards down the shore. So I took it in a backpack, and it's now in the National Museum. Weighs a tonne weight. Anyway, that's from Morvay. So that's a saddle corn, and there are quite a number of those finds from Connemara. You'll find them in field walls, but they were once used in a prehistoric settlement site. So it's a really nice artefact. A new site, new in that I only spotted it two years ago. This is on Omi Island. And this comes and goes, depending on the tidal regime. And this is just east of the main graveyard, Ola Brindhon. So the graveyard on Omi Island is called Ola Brindhon. That's its actual name. It's the altar or shrine of St Brendan. There was a monastic site on that side of the island. So the island itself is normally named after St Fahin, Omi Fahin, the residence of St Fahin. But this is a very interesting enclosure. A line of stones all the way around, incorporating natural boulders in its arc. We don't know what this is. It may be a boulder tomb. Boulder tombs are a feature of the southwest of Ireland, but you do have them scattered here, there and everywhere. And they're normally marking underneath the big boulders what would be a little tripod of stones with cremation burials in them. But it may not. But it's a new site. So a huge amount of what's going on, we don't know what's out there. But the first step is mapping them and recording them and being aware. Once you're aware that there's stuff on the intertidal zone, you're going to find it. So we have, this is one, I couldn't find one, there's a boat. So this is from an intertidal zone on Stratford Lock. If you've never been, go, it's a fabulous place. But there's one, of course, the famous Barna boat was found on the shore of Barna in the village and it dates 6,000 years old. At the time, when the bay was much lower and narrower than it is now. It was very like this one. So I stuck this one in because I couldn't find the size of the other one. So you've had in the coastal zone here, these episodic coastal populations, people moving in and out of the landscape over a long period of time. And every episode of population growth is represented on the landscape. Population drops away and the next group move in. So we've had about four colonisations of this area since the first colonisation 10,000 years ago. So it's nothing new. But this is the evidence. Oops, sorry. My fault, I was tapping the wrong time. We were practising this for hours before you came. So this is a field system on Inishark, Inishark Island. Inishark, the island of the sea monster, made famous by Oscar Wilde's mother, Francesca Wilde, who recorded so much of the sea skelter, the fairy legends of the island, in her journeys in Connemara in the mid to late 19th century. Anyway, that's a Bronze Age field system. There's a roundhouse there, can you see it? There's full of the few Bronze Age cooking sites here. These I identified. I worked on the Galway Archaeological Survey years ago. There's a big boundary coming down across it. The walls are running underneath it. But it's the remotest and best preserved Bronze Age landscape in Ireland. So it's kind of nice. And recently been excavated by a team from Notre Dame University, who have done exceptional work on shark mapping the islands here. So we're very lucky that we have this involvement. I brought them to the island because they were interested in doing just further research. They had been working in Jordan and they moved back Stock and Barrett to Connemara. So they've been working here on and off for 10 years. But it's a really important site. Other ones, the first evidence of intertidal zone archaeology in the West was recorded, not by archaeologists, but a wonderful antiquarian and scholar called Reverend MacBride. He was a partisan minister on Inishmore and he recorded this field system at Saw Whar, a whole network of walls running across the bog with house sites and cairns. If you fly into Inishmore, you'll fly into Killaney and you're flying over this drowned landscape. So it's a tide rising, it's covered. So it's really important and still visible in the landscape. This is one I found on the right hand side on the Inishkei Islands. So the Inishkei Islands, they've dabbled on to the south. Inishkei North and South, or rather South and North. And then you have Inishdora, where if you're buried there, you will remain eternal until you are resurrected. That was the great draw of being buried on Inishdora. They weren't trying to figure out which bits go where. Anyway, so these are early field systems. And as you can see it, flying in, there's a wall coming across, there it is there, there's cross walls, and these walls continue under the sand and form part of the modern landscape. So it's a really nice example of the reuse of earlier features in the landscape. That's what it looks like. So in the duach, the duach is the Irish word for the sandy plains, very ecologically important. As they're rolling out, you're finding these ancient walls. And in the shore, they're covered by the sea. So it's a really important landscape, the east side of Inishmore, as if they haven't enough wonders to go on the Aran Islands. You know, the Aran is just one of the really amazing landscapes. And we found one more recently on Inishman. I've done some field work there recently. But you're not just there, you'll find them down at Dogs Bay also. Go on again. So some of the things that's attractive to this area in the Bronze Age in particular are soapstones. So we have large soapstone deposits on the islands. And soapstone is easily carved, it's malleable, and it retains heat. So really important mineral resource. Mineral rights would have been always important. Clay would have been important. Copper, which would have been, we have copper mines from Connemara. We haven't identified a Bronze Age copper mine yet, but I have a good hint or suggestion of one. So this is Thrall Gyal on the west side of Inishbaffan. And all the lower cliff face there is all soapstone. You can carve it with your nail. And we have a soapstone mould from Culfin, just up the road, which was found about 60 years ago, for three different axes. So they're carving the moulds into the shape of a Bronze Age axe. And some portable smith is going around the place with his tool kit. Anyway, he left his mould behind, 4,200 years ago, at Culfin. And it's in the National Museum now. But it's really important evidence. And it's a soapstone mould. And then you have other lovely finds hidden in plain sight. This is one of my favourite sights. A few people here in front knows where that is. It's Atlantic view, I love it. But it's sadly acquired, reused. And this was quarried out of a mound. This was found in a moota. A moota is an Irish name for literally a mound. But it's a mound quite close to a Neolithic tomb on the Rainbow Peninsula. So it's on the upper road in Coshlane. But I think it's really great. Don't tell the National Museum. My brother-in-law will be down here in a flash. So I like artefacts in a position like this. Because they're there, they'll be there forever. Within reason. And it's a lovely ornament. So if you're walking around that lovely peninsula, this is a glimpse of history right there. Where are we going? We're still going. So we also have timber artefacts. Timber ones are ones that are harder to do. This is at Lippa. Lippa is near Anspigiel. So we found this one on a walk on the shore, again after the 2014 storm. And you can see there's more timber here. And it was excavated, and we have a date of around 1600 BC for this timber. So this is down low on the shore. What's that telling us? This is a timber trough, platform, track where we're not sure. There wasn't a lot of it left. But it's telling us when this was laid down in a bog, the sea was four metres lower than it is now. And that was half the width of Caldwell Bay. And half the depth of Caldwell. Caldwell Bay is a very shallow bay. So there's been massive sea level rise since this track where, whatever it was, was placed down. So a huge amount of sea. So any shelter at Caldwell Bay, when you're walking, you're likely to hit archaeology. When it's in the shelter off, there's no big tidal surge. Anyway, we'll keep going. Colfane, lovely site here. They made a film here a few years ago, what the bloody thing was. Anyway, this was proposed to one of the locations, but I had to check out all the locations to make sure they're not going to damage any archaeology. But we found a lovely site here. With a soapstone bead, but the site was of Iron Age date. And anyway, these filmmakers moved on. They made their film at Bundowlish instead. Anyway, this is Colfane. Very important site, because it's Iron Age date. It's what 2nd century BC, incredibly rare. We have loads of prehistoric sites, we have loads of early Christian sites, but there's a 400 year period in the middle that we have very little on. We have Dalquist though, and they're dated in two different areas of Cullamar. One at Dunlacham, the other at Feenish Island, and the other at Renfri, and they are dated. One is very early, 6,500 years ago. The other is very late, 6th, 7th century, at the beginning of Christianity. So, extracted from this little creature here, you drag him screaming out of it, you clip off a little liquid sack, and you expose it to sunlight, it goes crimson. So, purpura dye, the dye of the Phoenicians, copied by the Greeks, reused by the Romans, and it comes into Ireland when we become Christian, and used in the high status, senior clergy and Gaelic lords. Only the Gaelic nobility could wear the purple, and where are they getting it? Out of these little shellfish here. Omi Island, the north side, I'm not sure if the slide is right or not, we'll move on in case anyone conflicts me. Big excavations here. You can see this is the dark horizon, it's like something you get in the middle of the town. That's from the 10th, 12th century, lower down in the early monastery, and that side is still eroding, and I don't know if you can see the lovely programme on English Bottom about the return of the skulls from Omi Island that scholars from Trinity College stole from the island as a reference collection, now they've been handed back. These collection of bones, the state has refused to hand them back to the island, any of them, not even one bone, which is really a bit of a disgrace given that they promised they would bring some bones back to be re-buried. Anyway, this is Omi Island, and we don't have a Marie Coyne on Omi campaigning for the return. But this is a really important site, but it gives you an idea of the depth of these dunes, and as you dig into them there's interrupted settlements going back over thousands of years on these dunes. So that was during the excavation by Tygo Keefe many years ago. So those bones are in the National Museum. But even the loose ones, and this is a lovely site, this little cross, I was walking by it one day, it was a miserable old wet day, but you have to keep going, it was a tough job. And Greg Katz, an American friend of mine, was with me, and he says, come back here. I said, what? He just walked over a lovely cross. I said, what? And encircled the Latin cross on the shore that had eroded out of the monastery. It's one of two early crosses that we found right here. And that site now is just a big load of boulders, because over the years, most of the monastery has eroded out onto the shore. So you do find actual artefacts if you're looking. I'm not great at finding artefacts. People with me find them all the time, which is really annoying. And then you have this wonderful landscape, one of my favourite places, along Maclaren's Island, which we have this wonderful pilgrimage tradition on the 16th of July every year. So the monastery is here with its restored roof, its medieval burial ground, its early field system, its 19th century houses, but a possible title mill right down here. So with the early church, so Christianity comes to Ireland with science, with art, industry, technology, it's an old big movement. So it's a hugely, so from the 5th, 6th century, we're at the races technologically again, having been isolated from Europe for four centuries because of the Romans and Britain. So that's a view down on it. So a big holding pond, if you like, a narrow sluice, and a mill slightly there and there. We're not sure, but we do have very early title mills now elsewhere in Ireland. The earliest title mills in Europe are from Ireland. Naindrum, in County Downby, the most famous of them. And we also have the largest title mill in Ireland is on Galway Bay. This is Curran Roo, an early mill here. Drowned now because an outer mill was built creating a salt lake and there's the original channel feeding into the mill and then there's an outer mill, so this is, because in Inner Galway Bay there's no rivers. So what do you do for milling? Well, you dam the bay and you control the water going in and out through dams and canals. This is near Kinvarrow, just west of Kinvarrow, fantastic site. And of course, these are out of sequence but who cares, we're not bothered. So this is the pilgrimage day on 16th of July of the year, so really if you haven't been it's really lovely. One other thing about pilgrimage is as Catholicism has sort of declined in Ireland the popularity of pilgrimage has increased. It's now become a spectator sport for the lapsed Catholics of Ireland to go and look at actual pilgrims on pilgrimage. Anyway, a bit of authenticity in their life, just go on pilgrimage. So this is your restored, heavily restored, 10th century church off Flowers Island. They gave a signal up here which was their beautiful copy of it in limestone. It's a pity they didn't hold on to the original, it's now lost. That's why we should be documenting everything you do in the old building. This is, however, an amazing set of photographs taken in the 40s off the pilgrimage when it wasn't popular. Very local. Here you have people arriving by boat at the calm day. That's Mason Island. The women going around with the act, the shrine or the altar. The lads following up, socially distancing to the back. While he's heading home in the Galway Hooker This is the English Moor Island here. This is the church before it was rebuilt. And the main outside praying. So, another shrine down here. With a cross. So this is a really important landscape here. The most important ecclesiastical site we have in all of Kilmarnock. And one of the most important in Ireland. The reason it's important, it's still got the pilgrimage tradition. Anyone know what that is? Boring old geologists will tell you it's a big stone. They lack something important when looking at religious landscapes. It's called Faith. This is Bawd Cullen Kiln on the shore of Cush Harrigan. And this was one of three boats that brought Christianity to and from the Aran Islands. And it was a major shrine, as we can see, I hope. The only photograph we have of it was taken by Daphne Potion-Mose. She was the only English woman who came to Ireland many years ago and she photographed it. She published dozens of books. Incredible scholar. Convert to Catholicism, as it happened. But this is the photograph. And look at the men. They're looking at the various tracks of the sails, the boats, the anchors. And some of them are chipping off a little bit of it as a relic. So this is Bawd Cullen Kiln. Now the shrine has been moved 30 years ago. The priest decided, for whatever stupid reason, to move and build a new shrine right next to the graveyard, because it's right next to an early graveyard. And sort of moving away from the actual traditional boat, which is this one. And of course we then have this lovely tradition of holy wells in Colmar. More holy wells than almost everywhere else in Ireland. Were we more religious than everywhere else in Ireland? Probably not. So Ireland, Colmar, is known of survival of evidence and of tradition and language and culture. That's why we have more holy wells. These were all common all over the country. But they have vanished over the last 1,500 years, particularly over the last 1,000 years. And especially since the 17th century. But this is Bawd Cullen Kiln. So we have more holy wells associated with Cullen Kiln than any other saint in Colmar. Even though he never set foot in Colmar, almost certainly. As he headed off to Scotland. Other sites that turn up, we don't know really what they are. So this is just an example from Clew Bay. It may be a shipwreck or it could be a mill site. So this is some timber and stonework. It hasn't been excavated. That's Croke Fork, lovely mountain on top. And there's some timber that would have held a large timber post here. There's a whole little structure here. So it looks like it could be a mill or else part of a shipwreck. With the ballast still on top of it. We're not sure. And of course we have a Viking raid. The Vikings. In the 1950s or late 40s, Festie Price after a storm wandered down here to Hereford Beach and he found a Viking burial here. Sword, shield and dagger. He got three pounds from it. It's still in the National Museum. The sword was made on the Dutch-German border. From the Viking raiders which we know raided this coast from 795 and then repeatedly throughout the 9th century. Did they settle? No. They were defeated by the men of Ummel and the Canachnamara. So we saw the Vikings off. Though they do appear in folklore as associated with lots of other sites that are unrelated to the Vikings. So because the English didn't turn up here until very, very late, anything old in oral history was associated with Nalochlanay. Do you want to frighten the kids? Be cool amok, the Vikings are about. So the Vikings entered the world of the fairy host quite early. They were bumped up into the ether to terrify the children. Anyway, this is a really important discovery here. Probably was a little Viking raiding base. Temporary. Before they were booted out by the Canachnamara. But we do have some nice artefacts. This is a highburner. I was doing an end of a 10 day trip one day and an American guy was with me. He was bored stiff. And the final day we went to Ummel and I said, how am I going to impress him? And he said, do you ever find anything interesting? I said, we've been looking at the glories of Ireland for the last 10 days, what are you talking about? And he reaches over into the sand and he says like this. You can see here? This was sticking out of the sand. This was at the end of it. It's a highburner norse wind pen. Identical to one that was found in Lausanne Meadows in Newfoundland. The only Viking site in North America. Made in a workshop in Dublin. Trailed up to the north, over to the West Settlement in Greenland and dropped outside the house in Lausanne Meadows. Anyway, so that's why the sea is very interesting. You can get artefacts from anywhere. This is really lovely. Look at the detail on it. Anyway, it's a highburner norse. It's in the National Museum. Another one, a swan neck pen. There's flights of these. And some maps of Connemara. See Connemara stands out really well. It doesn't. This is a highbrowser. Can't sell a map of medieval Ireland without having it on it. So it's quite close to the shore here in 1426. But it drifts further and further out into the Atlantic and vanishes by 1700 as the North Atlantic gets explored in and out by everyone and his mother. So where the hell is Highbrowser? But look, what's important here, the Aran Islands are shown very well. Boffin is shown. And then, because they know there's a huge big bay on the West Coast with lots of islands in it. One guy said, are you sure there's not two big bays? He said, I'm telling you, just one big bay will do us, but stick in loads of islands in it. So that's Clue Bay and Galway Bay. Because someone has told some cartographer in Genoa, would you please put in a big enough bay with loads of islands in it. And this is Achill Head down here, the blaskets around it. As you can see how ill-informed people were on the West Coast of Ireland. The O'Flaherty's come to Kilmarnock haven't been booted out of. The O'Flaherty's were from Galway City up to here. This was the O'Flaherty world. They were pushed westward by the English, the Burks, the Burgos Lords in 1235 and the O'Connors are pushing down on the Roscommon and they move in here and they establish a series of castles. So all these castles are fairly late but they're taking over the place from the 13th century and they're dominating the landscape for the next several centuries. Their main castle in the west, this is it. This is Bunown Castle. Not the one you see from the road. This is where Grace of Maddy's three of her children were born here. This is the castle she married into at the age of 15, which is the normal marriage age in the Middle Ages. This is where the later castle is, up here. From the demolished remains of the older castle and a great stone fort that sat on top of that hill. That hill is called Cluckadoon. She on a fairy hill. Amazing folklore associated with it. And down here you'll see this little projection, that's the medieval harbour, there's an 18th century church, beautiful walled gardens here, there's a whole Gaelic maritime landscape still there. Because the authorities lost their land but another Gaelic family took them over, the Gaegans from Westmeath. How cross they must have been. You're losing 20,000 acres, the finest land in Ireland and you're getting 1,000 acres of bog and rock in Connemara. Wow. But at least you're holding on to your life, which a lot of the Gaelic lords didn't manage to do. And this is Bunown. And those of you into garden archaeology, some nice terracing all the way along here, look. There's your chapel, private chapel, that's your fortress on top. Recorded by Rubio Flaherty in his accounts in 1684, the first man to describe Connemara as a native historian, the last of them. And in the bay, at low tide, see how exciting maritime archaeology is? Limestone blocks on the shore at low tide. So it's either a shipwreck or it's ballast that's been thrown over, but it's from Arran. So there's been this relationship with Arran, particularly the finer detail on some of our medieval buildings and churches. The finer work is done in limestone, important from Arran. And that's some of it. This is another view of, this is called Coon, Coon, got it out of my head. Anyway, this is the mouth of Streamstown Bay. So look how narrow it is, 30 metres wide, maximum. Great tidal sort, great place to go scuba diving, or snorkelling, or kayaking. If you get to Olney Island, up out of here this is Baffin, Shark, Illinois Friar. This is an incredible maritime world, stuffed with wonderful archaeology. And on the narrows of Streamstown Bay you have Doon Castle, terrible slide. And you have your church site, Kill over here. So secular power here, ecclesiastical power on the other side, controlling a really important anchorage. And this is me having read Rory O'Flaherty and he says at Doon Castle there is a harbour for shipping. What the hell does that mean? Does he just mean an anchorage or does he mean an actual physical harbour? So the only way to find out is to go down to the harbour and start pulling weed. So this was taken by Henry Casey, he is here with me today, and that's me pulling weed and there is a harbour running right along and beneath the castle. So this was a wharf to offload materials that the O'Flaherty's were trading in and out of. And they weren't pirates, by the way. Rainbow Castle, very important site. It's where the survivors of the Falkenblanken Medina were brought to and O'Flaherty said just hand over your weapons there, you'll be grand lads. And in the following couple of days they were marched to their deaths in Galway where they were executed. Never trusted O'Flaherty's. And this is Rainbow Castle and so we have an Armada wreck just off the end of the tip of Rainbow Peninsula. These are the wrecks from the Spanish Armada. They haven't been located in detail with the exception of these ones here. And they've been recently worked on by the wonderful underwater archaeological unit. Really superb and they've done lots of work on shipwreck archaeology. And there was a nice shipwreck. I was trying to find a nice shipwreck close to Leatherfrack. That's kind of nice, isn't it? That's what a shipwreck looks like. A really well preserved shipwreck in the shells of water. This is after a hundred years. So what you have is a ballast mound and in this case the metal struts strutting up. So that's what people have imagined what a shipwreck underwater looks like. I've dived on that one. This would be a really well preserved one. They don't have the flags intact. Anyway, but it's a really interesting site on Fahey Bay. Gorgeous site. We also have Spanish pottery from Clegane. 16th century. So Clegane was an important anchorage and we know that from later sources. And we have our first mapping, detailed mapping of Connemara. South Connemara because the French were here. What would we do without the French? Well, we might have won at the Battle of the Buoys if they'd fought a bit harder. We have some interesting things about these maps. We have Ronstone Haven marked. So Ronstone is not a mistranslation of Trochnerone. It was Ronstone from the beginning. Anyway, that's here and there. And we have this wonderful harbour on Arran. We'll flick through it. Arkin's Castle, related to Inys Bafon. A fortress with a harbour marked. Look. So 17th century fortress on the side of an early monastery, on the side of an ancient harbour. And some cut stones with a line of seaweed looking suspicious. You have to be suspicious to be a field archaeologist. And then when you pull off the weed, you have the ancient harbour revealed. We also found a medieval cross that had been thrown into the Potoch, the mook, by the Cromwellans, those bloody Republicans. Destroying our lovely antiquities. And we have a similar harbour on Inys Bafon. This was used as a prison colony, of course, during the Cromwellan wars. And after the wars, this fort was built and they also built a harbour. The harbour might be earlier. There was an O'Malley castle here prior to this. And there is the harbour. Goes all the way around. Very large. 1900 metres. Fantastic site. It's probably related to this castle built in 1656 or the earlier O'Malley ones. That's what it looks like now. The recent storms have damaged this building here, which was the medieval 17th century. There's a medieval hamlet here. 17th century hamlet. We have the pottery from. And the foundation stone. That's the cove. And that's the built harbour. And in the inner harbour, again, this is where the sheltered parts of the bays are important, we have the remains of another shipwreck. And there was a 17th century one found during the extension of the quay in Inishbob. So Inishbob was a really important place. So we'll finish with this one. It's called the fort. It's called the fort. I'm not quite sure why it was called the fort. Is there one more slide? Maybe it's because it looks like a fort. And we have a reference from 1708 to the building of a fort on Roundstone Haven by the crew of a ship that had sailed from Macau with three Catholic clergymen aboard ship. They'd been expelled during the Chinese Rights Controversy. It doesn't flip off everybody's tongue. Anyway, the Chinese Rights Controversy was a controversy over the conversion of the Chinese by Christian missionaries. And the poor old emperor just requested a couple of simple things. Dress as Chinese are expected. Dress as Chinese are expected. And you'll be fine. And acknowledge Confucianism. And the Jesuits sign us up now. Complaints were made about the heretical tendencies and they were expelled from Fujian province which is just opposite Taiwan. They made their way to Macau and they're in dire trouble now. So an Ice English captain said hop aboard and pay me later. A year and three months later that frigate, escorting six East Indian merchant ships arrives in Ramstall, Havert and they build a fort. And the reason we know about it is because the letters from those clergymen survive in the Vatican archives. And they have a lovely comment if you think the prosecution in China is bad where did you come to Ireland? Anyway, I'll leave you with that. Go raibh míle maith agaibh. applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause