UNDER BARE Ben Bulben’s head in Drumcliff churchyard, Yeats is laid . . . but the rocks of the mountain he loved so much continue all the way across Sligo and into north Mayo, forming majestic cliffs at Downpatrick Head and at the foot of the Céide Fields.
“Look,” the woman says, “look just below and left of that white line. On the green bit . . . There. See? That’s where she laid them.”
We are standing on a viewing platform in front of the Céide Fields interpretative centre in Ballycastle and looking at the 370ft high cliffs of carboniferous limestone, sandstone and shale that form the coast. They are 350 million years old, but the woman is interested – bubbling with excitement, in fact – in something much younger.
Across from where we are standing, high up on the face of the cliff, a pair of peregrine falcons made their nest on a ledge, and two chicks have hatched. The ocean is calm again today, the sun high at midday.
“There! Can you see? I think I saw them move!” says the woman.
She hands me her binoculars but I can’t see a thing.
A man, Jim, joins us and he sees them immediately. “Are you Peter Murtagh from The Irish Times?” he asks casually.
“Oh my God,” exclaims the woman, now in something of a flap. “You’re not?”
I am.
“Oh my God! We were told to watch out for you and here am I . . . ” The woman is Pamela, a guide at the Céide Fields centre, a delight to be with and a fountain of knowledge – on all things local, on the history of the fields, and on the plant and animal wildlife of the bog and of the locality.
The Wild Atlantic Way goes east/west across the top of Mayo and Sligo along the R314 (at Belmullet, take a spur south and go to the bottom of the Mullet via the R313). Take the N59 from Bangor to Ballina and you’ll miss all this.
David Tyrrell, who manages the Broadhaven Bay Hotel, thinks anything that lures people further north into Erris is a good thing. There’s so much landscape to see and history to acquaint oneself with, he says. And he’s correct.
The Wild Atlantic Way goes past the front door of the Céide Fields centre. The fields are the most extensive Stone Age monument and enclosed field system anywhere in the world. They are about 5,700 years old – older than the pyramids.
When Stone Age man evolved from a hunter-gatherer (in Ireland about 6,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age ended), he became a farmer. At that time, the land that slopes down to the sea cliffs from Maumakeogh Mountain was rich and fertile; the climate warm – about the same as Lisbon in Portugal is today.
Here, Neolithic man created long narrow strip fields by dividing the land, parallel with the contour of the hill, using stones, piled one on top of the other to a height of about 1.5m. The strips were then subdivided into fields of between five and 15 acres; and each strip had one dwelling enclosure for a family. Archaeologists have so far surveyed some 84km of walls across diverse sites in north Mayo.
In the fields, the farmers grew crops but mostly kept animals – cattle, sheep and goats. They cremated their dead, burying the ashes in court and portal tombs, where pieces of pottery have also been found.
These people had no fighting weapons and there is no evidence they fortified themselves against attack. But gradually the bog encroached on the fields, probably encouraged by climate change; the people moved and the bog eventually swallowed the fields.
Until, that is, the 1930s when they were found by Patrick Caulfield, a Belderrig school teacher. But they were not revealed fully until his archaeologist son, Séamus of UCD, began serious excavations in the early 1970s. It was he who christened the place Céide, the hill with the flat top.
“In one sense,” says centre director Gretta Byrne, “it’s a very simple story. It’s a story of the everyday lives of the people who lived here and how they organised their farming.”
Tomorrow: Donegal