What's all this then?

I'm in a pretty fortunate position of having funding for my PhD research. It's not much, granted, but I feel it brings with it a certain amount of responsibility to disseminate my work as widely as possible. Most particularly, I feel that anyone so privileged as to spend their working week researching the past should spend at least a little effort in sharing some of that knowledge to all you wonderful tax payers who have made that possible. Here in Ireland, we have the most amazing archaeological sites that most of us travel past at high speed without a second thought to just how fascinating they are. While all our Boom Time motorways have made our heritage accessible, it also means that we mostly only get to enjoy it at 120km an hour. I hope to use this blog to remind people of just how awesome all those mounds of dirt and heaps of stone are.

My PhD research is on how we interact with the landscape in order to move through it and how this process creates routeways over time. I'm not going to discuss my actual research in any depth here - I've got to save that for my thesis! If you are interested though my abstract is here. My plan is to choose a site once a week and write a brief blog post on it. I have a map over on Google Maps Engine Lite where I'll place a pin on each of these sites so all of you lovely people can take in some of these great spots whenever you like. The major case study of my research is North Offaly and South Westmeath, so you're going to see a pattern in what sites I choose from week to week. As I describe each site, I'll add in a bit of discussion as to what it's got to do with movement. I'd like for you all to see these sites as I do, not just lonely ruins in the middle of nowhere, but important indicators of past networks where real people lived and breathed and moved around. None of this happened in isolation and proximity to a routeway would be vital for a community to thrive.

For those of you in the know, my study area is a landscape of esker and bog, which has an enormous effect on movement. These bogs would have started to form about 10,000 years ago as undecomposed plant material clogged up shallow lakes. A fen is formed which eventually grows so thick that it is no longer fed by alkaline groundwater, but by rainwater. It is at this point that the bog becomes a raised bog which is what we have so much of in the Irish Midlands. I'll write a full post of bog formation another day, I just want to give a brief background in this post of what to expect.

Eskers were formed slightly earlier at around 15,000 years ago and consist of long ridges of gravel and other sediments which were left behind after the glaciers. As the glaciers moved through the country, a number of underground rivers formed beneath the ice sheets. These rivers filled with beds of gravel and sand, which were deposited with the retreat of the glaciers. These deposits are known as esker ridges and are slightly elevated and well-drained, so of obvious benefit when there are expanses of bog on either side. Again, I'll write more on this later.

I've thought long and hard about whether or not to give bibliographies with my posts because I want to avoid this project becoming too academic, but I think in the interest of transparency I should. This way, if you feel intrigued enough to delve a little deeper into the past, you have everything you need.

Most people think I'm weird when I get excited about bogs and eskers, but I hope you'll all join me in my enthusiasm as I take you through some of the great ways you can experience them

Yolande.