Lough Boora, Co. Offaly

So my first blog post is on Lough Boora and you'll find the map here

Lough Boora is a beautiful area of parklands East of Banagher in County Offaly. This bog was the first cutaway bog that Bord na Móna ceased work in and it has since been converted into the parkland you can see there now. It has thrived as a habitat and is a favourite spot for bird watchers who might be lucky enough to see redshank, lapwings and even some of their very successful partridge population. I confess I know very little about birds, but I found myself wishing I did and I've since gotten a pair of binoculars. The parklands are arranged with a series of looped walks so you can choose your own distance and dedicated cycle paths will take you through the range of bog and farmland if you prefer a cycle. Part of the walk through the parklands takes you through a sculpture park of a series of enormous sculptures, inspired by the archaeological timber found at these sorts of places, and by the legacy of peat cutting over the years. If it's plants you're into, you'll find plenty of bog cotton, yellow furze and orchids. Woodland is regenerating on the drier parts with willow, birch and aspen.

The Sky Train sculpture

For me, the most interesting part of this attraction is the Mesolithic camp site which was discovered there in 1977 when the lake was drained by Bord na Móna for peat harvesting. At the time of use, the site would have been located on a storm beach of a lake of open water. Excavation by Michael Ryan from the National Museum of Ireland revealed a number of hearths which have been radiocarbon dated to tell us the site dates from about 7030-6400BC. Over 600 examples of stone tools were found and most of these lithics are part of the microlithic tradition of this period, produced with a method of indirect percussion involving a punch and hammer. These were mostly made from chert stone, which is what was used across Ireland at this time if flint was not available locally. The excavation also uncovered three complete polished stone axes, highly prized items which required many hours of polishing to create.

68% of the animal bones found here were of fish, mostly brown trout and eel. This is typical of a Mesolithic diet, which was predominantly fish based. That left 23% mammal bone and 8% fish. Of the animal bone, almost all was of wild pig, telling us there was forest nearby where they could hunt pig and gather nuts or fruit. Most plant matter doesn’t usually survive to tell us more about diet, but hazelnuts have been found which tells us that the site was used in the Autumn. The eel would have been fished in late summer and according to Van Wijngaarden-Bakker, the pig bones show they were probably killed in the summer.

Even today when walking around these parklands, it's quite striking how full of life it is. We're used to thinking of bogs as dead landscape, and to a certain extent this is true of the ones that are still being cut, but a couple of years has returned this bog to a living landscape. You can't walk a few feet without another bird call to enjoy, or the sight of one of the 130 different bird species there, though we don't have to worry about wild pig emerging from the forest as we take our Sunday stroll. The lake waters have carp, tench, bream and rudd, and although this is another example of how full of life this place is, they were all introduced in historic times and would not have been fished in the Mesolithic here.

A great spot for wildlife

What has it got to do with movement?

Most of our Early Mesolithic sites are found along the coast or within easy access of it. By finding a site of this period in the very centre of Ireland, we have shown that these hunter-gatherers moved much further inland than previously thought. At the time of this site’s use, many of the raised bogs which make up the Irish Midlands would still have been areas of open water, which is exactly the sort of eco-system which these people would have sought out for fishing. This means, that it is entirely possible that Early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers came inland, camping around lakes in the midlands, but they have now been covered in peat.

Our understanding of Early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers is that they were quite mobile, moving to different campsites according to season. As we've seen, Lough Boora was used in the summer and early autumn, and they would have used what resources they could before moving on to a more suitable location for winter. The usual model is that coasts were occupied in the spring, rivers and lakes in the summer (that's what we see here) and on to uplands for winter. So where did they come from before camping on this storm beach? Where did they move to afterwards? And how did they make the journey? Did they boat using a dug-out canoe? Or did they walk along the esker to the coast?

Maybe you'll ponder these questions if you take a trip there, or maybe you'll just enjoy a picnic and the sculptures, but it's certainly an attraction that has a lot to offer to all sorts of interests.

http://www.loughbooraparklands.com/

O'Connell M. (1980) Pollen analysis of fen peat from a Mesolithic site at Lough Boora, County Offaly, Ireland. Journal of Life Sciences of the Royal Dublin Society 2: 45-49.

Ryan M. (1980) An Early Mesolithic site in the Irish midlands. Antiquity Cambridge 54: 46-47.

van Wijngaarden-Bakker LH. (1990) Faunal remains and the Irish Mesolithic. The Mesolithic in Europe. International Symposium. 3. 125-133.