The Great Outdoors 23jan2025

The program is sponsored by Forum Connemara's social inclusion program, PSICAP, which supports individuals, community groups, and social enterprises across Connemara. They discuss environmental and climate sustainability. Michael Gibbons talks about an Iron Age burial mound discovered in Kerry Harbour. He explains the characteristics of a ring barrow and how it differs from other types of burial mounds. These types of burial mounds are rare in Connemara and are easily missed due to their low profile. There may be more undiscovered ring barrows in the area. Michael also mentions similar burial mounds found in other parts of Ireland and Britain. This program is sponsored by Forum Connemara's social inclusion program, PSICAP, which supports individuals, community groups and social enterprises across Connemara. Contact us today to see how we can help you at 095 4116 or see forumconnemara.ie. Fáilte a róis, go raibh maith agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaib agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh agaibh but we're going to go over now to EcoFloss as I will be speaking with Michael Gibbons. The EcoFloss on Canamara Community Radio, a weekly program focusing on environmental and climate sustainability. This program is co-funded by Commissioner Naaman through the Sound and Vision Scheme. Right I'm delighted to welcome Michael Gibbons to the program once again. Michael you're welcome to us once more here on Canamara Community Radio. Hello Michael. Hello Michael. We have Michael somewhere there in the background I can hear the music going on. Hello Michael. Hello Michael. We seem to have lost Michael again even though we were talking to him. We'll have to try and see if we can get him again but as I say okay I think we might have Michael with us now. Michael can you hear me okay? Hello Michael. Michael we'll call you back I don't know what's the situation we have to bring you back okay just hold on. So I'm not quite sure what's going on there and we'll try Michael once more and we will see if we can get him. I don't know what was happening I could hear the noise in the background I could hear Michael but he couldn't hear me obviously. So we will be talking to him about a piece that was discovered in a burial mound known as a ring barrow and that would be very interesting but as I say we're just trying to get Michael. Are we going to try him on the other phone? Go on here just that one which is well let's see if we can get him on first of all I suppose. We could take in a bit of music. Hold on we might have him here we'll just wait and see. So we're just trying to see if we can get Michael lined up now and hopefully we will have him and say it's just that we've had some little problem with our phone there so we'll just try if we can get him and hopefully we will have him with us now. Hello Michael can you hear me okay? I can perfect. Great thanks a million that's good to talk to you. Michael I'll just mention you know that a fantastic burial mound dating back about 3,000 years that you've been involved in looking at that. Tell me a little bit about the background to this particular burial mound. Oh yeah it's very well the site itself is located on the Mayo side of Kerry Harbour and how I came about it was typical how you come about things a site that I've passed dozens if not hundreds of times over the years and as many other people have as well. I was talking to Simon Ash one day who lives in Doreen and he showed me a photograph an aerial photograph of the Kerry and on it was what looked like a circular pit and I said well that's very very interesting and it looked what I had the possibility of being an Iron Age burial monument just from what you could see on it it was sort of a little hollow with the suggestion of a mound in the middle of it so anyway I had had a look at it before early on the year but there was heavy bracken on it so I was fairly convinced then that the site was a barrel but a barrel was a burial a particular type of burial mound that you find in the Bronze Age and more typically in the Iron Age so the centuries before Christ but I waited until after the snow had died down this year and all the bracken of course was beaten down with all the bad weather we had so I went out for another look just after around the year and as I went down the bracken is gone and it was a classic Iron Age burial mound which is very very interesting because they're so rare in Connemara there's one other possible one in Rynfael there's one on Binshle of Overlook in Cornamona that was found a good few years ago and these are very slow to the ground minements so they're very very easily missed and they're extremely rare in the west of Ireland particularly near the coastal areas but and they're very common burial minements in say the Rancrois and Tulsk area you get loads of them also in parts of Limerick full of them and then you have them at Tara of course for anyone who hasn't been to Tara it's just a magnificent 200 acre complex and there's loads of different type of barrels stretched dozens of them right across the whole inside there so that you often find them as within royal sites. Okay so tell us exactly what a ring barrel is then I mean how do you differentiate it from anything else? Well that's the difficult thing once you see them they're very easy to sort of to acknowledge that it's clearly a man-made so it's a little mound maybe two three meters across sometimes a meter high you know occasionally they can be much bigger than this but this would be a typical one and outside that you have a ditch that's dug out and the digging of the ditch then you throw out an outer bank so it's a mound with a ditch dug around it with an outer bank enclosing it so it's and within that then you'll have a series normally cremation burials occasionally then you'll have a scatter of bones sometimes with and occasionally you'll have an extended burial so a proper or a crouch burial you can get in them so they're the burials the very form that was used just leading up to it in the first couple of centuries of christianity so they're very different from the preceding stone circles standing stones stone alignments and cairns that you get in the bronze age and they're completely different mining type from the neolithic tombs that we have in greater mundans all around west connemara and southwest mayo so it's they're easily missed so they're very low to the ground literally you won't see them unless you walk over them and only we only see them at this time of year when the vegetation is right down so this is quite an interesting site um there's some others quite close by in the arrow valley there's a couple of nice ones here to pass them and the one in the arrow valley is very interesting it's not too far away uh in that it's got a pair of standing stones sitting on top of the mound so sometimes they do or are matched with standing stones and in one or two occasions like an island in east mayo you have an olm stone so a stone with an early irish inscription on it which date them sometimes to just the sort of the cusp of the pagan christian world the interphase um very few of them have been excavated in the west but the new road schemes that are going in around national roads authority they have a fantastic team of archaeologists working on them uh there's been several excavated down near gart all those near ballinasloe and so we know more about them now than we used to um but none of the ones this far west have been excavated okay okay now i suppose if as you said there's a few of them in the valley not that far from this would we kind of assume that they may all be belong to the same people or would they have been possible that they were all isolated from each other in that sense or what can you assume anything from what you've seen well what we know is that if you think of some periods in irish history people are very loud the neolithic they're screaming at you there's dozens of tombs around here the bronze age of all these very public stone alignments and durian burn she on and lanina and landlash you know very obvious public minutes when it comes at the iron age everything goes quiet in the west anyway very low to the ground monuments very little ostentation no pottery um so it's complete and it coincides of course with as we've been coming in the romans to britain so there's a sort of marked contrast going on you have at the same time as these are being built in all studies massive linear earthworks that are being built right across from doing all beta to dog bay huge tribal dozens of kilometers along so but in the west we have like i can show you 50 prehistoric sites in connemara this is the only site i could say we definitely said that's an iron age monument so that's how rare they are and um but it also means that there's likely to be others out there that has better that are undiscovered because you need very good light to see them because you know they over time they do degrade just from weathering so this one is a perfect example there's a possible example out in um near tulip egg uh just to the west of the beach there in the field rushing actually but it's not it's a circular enclosure around the little hollow so it's possibly one but it's not quite definite and then during the big storms down in dogs bay in 2014 when that storm cut through the middens there the whole dune system like a knife is exposed what may be uh a barrel also but it just sliced it into and was visible for a brief period a mound with a ditch either side of it with burning inside that so um so very very interesting site okay now i suppose the big thing then i mean i've read recently or i was reading somewhere recently about the the roman barrels and i don't know if they're exactly the same things you find them all over england there's quite a few of them are they kind of basically the same style or is there a different way when you look at them in other countries well there are barrows are a feature so barrow just means a burial mound like we have burial mounds in sligo that are 5000 years old uh we have burial mounds bronze age burial mounds as well so barrels in itself don't tell you what date they are but this particular type a little ring barrel with a central mound is almost always bronze or iron age indeed so that's what's interesting about it seems to be at the very end of the burial the burial tradition pre-christian sometimes they'll refer to the irish word fertile like plan flirt first there's a word used to describe an ancestral burial mound before christianity that's where people were buried and then later with the christianization of the place between the fourth and the seventh century uh people are now being aged in are into new christian burial grounds are the older mounds are being incorporated into the new christian so they're uh they're kind of a sort of that's why it makes them so interesting in that uh they're at this period where there's very little going on like there's beehive currents down the road in the man valley uh i remember years ago on top of a wall there was a lovely particular type of beehive current for grinding corn and that dated from around the same period first century bc there was another one i found in sheehan's years ago in the wall um a portion of one and um so the okay sorry just uh michael we've just lost michael there we were trying to get back to him for a second um it just seems that i've disappeared on us um so we'll just see if we can catch up with him because we have a few more minutes to go i don't know if we'll be able to get him he may not be able to answer us i think he can be waiting for a step so yeah we'll see if we can get him there um but this is a fascinating thing of course and it mentions here on the press release that occasionally beads or some bronze artifacts can also be found along with these pieces but very occasionally i would think and i think we might not be able to get michael so we'll probably just leave this there and we'll get back to him another time no we might haven't so we'll just wait and see if we can just get back to hi michael sorry about that the thing just seems to have died on us so you okay there again yeah so just one thing i was reading and i mentioned there that sometimes when these are excavations there could be cremated uh bold beads or maybe bronze artifacts yeah you get glass beads in them and sometimes we have a couple of burials from a place called four abbey the famous abbey associated with four where you had crouched burials almost in the fetal position and those burials you had glass beads and you also have suggestions also that they arrive this particular burial are sometimes associated with new arrivals because in parts of ireland we know there was people either fleeing the roman empire arriving into ireland or irish groups that had been living in roman britain and coming back having spent a lifetime in the roman armies bringing back their artifacts and pottery and like one of the finds we have from calmore is a coin from the emperor diocletian from the fourth century diocletian was an emperor just at the end of the roman empire his great palace was in present-day croatia yeah yeah so we do have a roman material going on so the the burials are from a very very interesting period in irish history it's one that's completely it's kind of a tricky one because we have loads of accounts of ireland but they're all written in the eighth ninth century they may or may not be reflecting what's going on in the irish and then we have this huge gap of visible monuments so this could be one of the link sites with pre-history and early christian ireland okay well that sounds fantastic well well done michael again there unfortunately we've run out of time but thank you so much for being with us uh this evening talking about that and as i say no doubt we'll be talking to you about it again in the future but thanks for being with us thank you bye bye bye thank you bye and michael gibbons there will give you some information on that burial mound uh we're just going to go to our ad break after the uh the uh eco slot out a weekly program focusing on environmental and climate sustainability this program is co-funded by commissioner maman to the sound and vision scheme it's sale time at broderick's electrical castle bar and westport our january sale has started so call in and grab yourself a bargain with everything reduced now is the time to upgrade your kitchen appliances or treat yourself to the latest technology so if you're looking for the best brands at the best prices make sure to call into broderick's electrical or look us up online at broderickselectrical.ie 09828130 for westport 0949044735 for castle bar Clifton Supply Centre Galway Road Clifton provide building supplies plumbing and heating supplies fuel merchants diy and general hardware contact the Clifton Supply Centre on 095-214-76 you are listening to connemara community radio broadcasting on 87.8 and 106.1 fm you can also listen in to us from outside of the connemara area on our website www.connemarafm.com good morning to you and hope all is good with you on the lovely island this sunday morning good evening welcome to connemara community radio coming to you from the engineering studio and if you just join us welcome to connemara community radio broadcasting on 87.8 and 106.1 fm yeah new dorsey uh followed by captain b for our 12th would you get it connemara community radio 095-41616 if you'd like a song played hello hello hello you're welcome to me i'm forecasting life that was a great tune by fairport convention and i come on me there's a candy going on there have you dancing around the kitchen hello everyone hope you're doing well you're listening to connemara community radio i hope that actually we've made it work for the whole thing is which i'm sure you know how to do you can also listen in to us from outside the connemara area on our website www.connemarafm.com hope you're all well it's a nice feature for artists they've been around from the 50s sold more than 250 million records worldwide making them one of the best selling artists of all time so that's it for tonight i'd like to thank you all for listening and uh hope that you will tune in again next week connemara community radio thank you very much for listening and i hope you enjoyed all of the music right uh we're in the middle of changing studios trying to get things organized we're having a little bit of a problem at the moment with our phone systems and i don't think it's anything to do with the big storm but uh we are just trying to get ourselves sorted out here so hopefully everything is going okay for us other than that we're trying to see we just get daryl turish who is that president of connemara pony breeders society to talk to him about what's going on but we may actually if we can't get him we might have to go to john keeney so maybe try john keeney there and see if we can get him because otherwise we're going to be getting ourselves into trouble here trying to keep everybody under in the right spots so we'll just see who we have if we can get either so it's number 14 i think and on that we want uh but as i say we don't need this immediately huh john keeney i think we might have john coming up now we hope and daryl seems to have disappeared on us but we will try and get him again so um the galway astronomy club's astro fest is coming up and i'm delighted to welcome once again to the program john keeney who is the of galway astronomy club john you're welcome to us here in connemara thank you brendan thank you for having me no problem at all it's great talking to you again john um the galway astro fest is taking place this weekend tell me a little bit about this yeah our annual festival is taking place it's our 22nd festival and it all kicks off tomorrow evening at 8 p.m where the in the cinema here in galway where they're showing interstellar as part of the festival and if you can remember that movie that came out around 10 years ago and then it should be a spectacle on the big screen and um but that's that's the first event of the weekend and then of course on saturday we have our full day of talks by various speakers and exhibitions in and then the hall there in the miller park hotel and astrophotography stands and several other clubs and yeah we have a full day of talks lined up for saturday in the miller park hotel okay so it's there's a great interest in astronomy people are fascinated because we've had an awful lot of things happen in the last a couple of months with the auroras being very visible quite a few times and of course then the alignment of all of the planets coming up at the moment a lot of people have a real interest but probably would like to find more all the time yeah i think luckily for ourselves really for the astrophys the lineup of the planets has created a huge amount of interest we actually had a viewing session there ourselves last saturday and the weather was very clear we decided to put up a few telescopes out in Salt Hill and a huge amount of people came over wanting to know more wanting to know what was up there and that has generated a lot of interest in the festival now because they want to know more about astronomy which is fantastic and of course like you said we had a spectacular year of auroras last year and we had several really really huge aurora displays something we haven't seen in this country for nearly 20 years i'd say so um yeah there's a huge interest out there and it's great to get the word out that there's clubs like ourselves and and the festivals like what we're doing on saturday going on in in ireland and obviously the big aspect of this is to try and get more young people involved because they're quite fascinated by it but also as uh you know for the future uh a lot of them will probably go into science and things of that and get them into involved with anything to do with astronomy it's hugely important because there's incredible work going on within irish universities and colleges with some of these things but they need more people i presume yeah it's important to keep people interested in science and uh even in mathematics um but yeah the it's just it is amazing the but where we're at at the moment and with regards to universities some of the universities are and even here in Galway um we have um equipment being you know researched like the university of Galway they have a huge optics um group there and some of those optics and the research around it has been used in some of the biggest telescopes in the world and some of the researchers in dublin have um done work on some of the the modules that were attached to the um James Webb space telescope that's the biggest piece of equipment i'd say or the most important piece of equipment put up into the space ever and it's great that some of the irish students were involved in that now so the astro fest this afternoon as you say it's uh running on uh friday night at start is it or saturday morning and then saturday are there a series of lectures or talks and uh throughout the day into people can how people can just go in to visit those when it suits them or how's the story yeah well then we do we do have options depends on on if you want to um and attend for the whole day or half a day and and just we will cater for everybody and if you want to just attend one lecture i'm sure there'll be some way we can work around that but people usually attend for half a day or or full day but um i think we've kind of managed to come up with a really varied and list of subjects this time like we're covering everything from going into ancient history with with archaeology and ancient astronomers and with Anthony Murphy and some really modern stuff from one of our own kind of graduates from the university of Galway here Jemima Farrell using ai and space telescope to look down at the earth again to um to model and keep an eye on climate issues and environmental issues and really come forward to that and that's a fascinating subject uh we have David Coffey talking about uh star formation and we have Hans Hribris who's been um talking about the possibility of water on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn i'll actually love his uh his title 20,000 leagues under an alien ocean if you know yeah it's a book it's a book for 20,000 leagues yeah yeah and then we have Jack Owen who's been talking about the Hubble's constant tension and that's basically dealing with the expansion of the universe and everything that that entails like that that brings in a subject like huge subjects in science tomorrow dark matter dark energy and how is the universe expanding and Owen is kind of he's from the ATU in Flago and he's really at the cutting edge of this research at the moment his team has made great discoveries and I think they're leading the leading the field at the moment in in that subject so really really looking forward to that and also then we have um Gabe McDonald um who'll be um talking about about uh setting up your own observatory now he did this for himself in Kildare uh just in his backyard and they set up the it's fairly modest equipment and he actually discovered an asteroid so really looking forward to Dave's talk at all so yeah he certainly does and I think I see here an ellipse by binary star and he's published two papers on asteroid uh rotation so he's obviously somebody with a great interest in in science and in astronomy and this is it's a wonderful thing so if people are interested where do they get tickets or do they just come to the door or can they get them online and we offer both options and we would prefer if people go online because one it will give us an idea of how many are turning up like two like we don't want to turn anybody away just in case we do get sold out so if you go to galwayastronomyclub.ie and if you click on events there and you'll see that just at the top of that that drop down list you have after fest 2025 and you'll see everything that's going on on the two days on that page but at the very very bottom you'll see a link for purchasing tickets but yes we will have tickets available on the day as well okay well listen it's a wonderful talking to you again now John as I say I enjoy getting in contact and I'm saying we'll hopefully it'll go really well for you and thank you so much for being with us this evening here on the program thank you very much talk to you talk to you thanks John thanks John thank you right that's John Keeney there who's chairman of Galway Astronomy Club talking about Galway AstroFest taking place this weekend and as he said there's a lot of different things between the film there which is Interstellar by Christopher Nolan starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine and that's on the big screen there at the Eye Cinema but also then on the Saturday so many different events taking place throughout the day there wonderful talks and if you are interested as he said get on to www.galwayastronomyclub.ie and then you'll find all the information there as well so it's really good now we're hopefully we'll be getting us back on track with who we should have but we're going to go with a piece of music from the movie Greece and we are going to listen to Shanna now with a group a song called so yeah so so so how low can you go how low can you go how low can you go how low so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so 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