A woman that worked at the hotel we stayed at last night insisted we stop by Céide Fields as we went through, and that was good advice. You’ve likely never heard of it, but this is the world’s most extensive Stone Age monument. It’s a system of fields, the remnants of dwelling areas and the megalithic tombs sprawling out over hundreds hectares, and it dates back almost 6,000 years.
This is the oldest such example we have in the archeological record, and it’s worth stopping to consider. The people were managing fields and livestock, six millennia ago. Since we were just learning, at our last stop, about the preservative nature of the bogs, it’s reasonable to think that there were other such places like this … indeed, the thinking is that the techniques used here came with the people as they moved from West Asia through Europe. Here’s an artist’s conception of what it might have looked like.
And here’s a bit of the wall ruins. That little white post is an important marker. The white posts trace the outline of where the archeologists have found the walls.
You can see more of those markers here. We’re walking on this path, but we’re walking right next to one of the walls. They’ve found more than 62 miles of walls, and some of their buildings and tombs. The walls managed cattle, and they were a little more than 3-feet tall. (Even back then, cattle couldn’t jump.) Over the years it got colder and wetter here, and the speculation is that this is what led to the abandonment of the land.
The work is hardly done. There’s a lot of land here to explore, and it’s a manual operation, full of physically probing the earth for the well-preserved evidence of the people that worked on the land. You walk through the visitor’s center, so that you may pay, and they direct you outside into the fields, so that you may see a glimpse of the work. You learn that the composition of the ground means it is a manual and physical exploration.
It didn’t always look like this.
The settlers found woodlands, birch and pine. What they left had been understood in some small way by the locals for at least a century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the significance of the place came together for researchers. And while there’s a lot they don’t know, they are still piecing it together.
There’s a great satellite photo that has a graphic showing the rediscovered walls. You can see how the straight lines of the wall remnants continue on beyond the drawn lines. Sometimes they follow the contours of the earth, and sometimes they make the contours. While the weather changed, people would have either moved back or moved off. And if there’s one thing we know its that people will use the resources around them, so some of those old stone fences stayed fences, or the stones themselves might have been repurposed. And it’s all quite interesting.
I asked them if they’d tried lidar, and apparently just last year they’d had some side scanning done. The guy, who really wanted to go home and not answer my silly questions, said they were waiting for more on the results. I should probably set a news alert for that.
But would you like to see the most interesting thing?
This is a tree that fell more than 4,300 years ago. It’s a pine tree. A schoolteacher dug it up just four miles from here, one of the largest bog pines found in the area.
That schoolteacher, Patrick Caulfield, started putting two-and-two together about all of the stones he kept running across while he was cutting turf, for heat. He’d noticed the stones were piled in lines and reasoned that that wasn’t natural. Maybe they were put there by people. Maybe the rocks were there before the bog started to take hold.
His son, Seamas Caulfield, studied archeology, and it was Seamas who started adding some context. There’s some debate about whether all of this is from the stone or bronze age, and so the work goes on, but we are looking at a 4,300 tree. And it’s beautiful.
I wonder what you could make with lumber that is thousands of years old. And now I’ll spend the rest of our trip wondering what I’m walking over in the well-preserved earth.
Sometimes, in thin places, the informed guesses of archeology don’t feel sufficient to tell the story of a place. Imagine, then, how inadequate the rest of us must feel trying to understand or explain it.
