Céide Fields: an extensive Neolithic site in Ireland
BALLYCASTLE, Ireland--It took 40 years, but Seamas Caulfield finally solved the puzzle of his father's peat bog, and in the process unearthed a 5,000-year-old Stone Age village.
Schoolteacher Patrick Caulfield was digging peat--long-decayed vegetation that has been used for domestic fuel in Ireland for centuries--in a bog near this western Ireland hamlet in the 1930s when his spade struck rocks two metres down.
He cleared the immediate area and discovered that the rocks formed part of a wall...
... What they unearthed has been called the most extensive Neolithic site in the world, a farming community dating back to before 3,000 B.C.
Now a state-of-the-art visitor centre has been built on the site to showcase the C?ide Fields dig. Byrne is the manager. She takes a visitor on a walk over part of the site, on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, pointing out stone-walled fields, livestock enclosures, dwellings and tombs used by people at the dawn of recorded history.
Read entire article at The Vancouver Courier
Schoolteacher Patrick Caulfield was digging peat--long-decayed vegetation that has been used for domestic fuel in Ireland for centuries--in a bog near this western Ireland hamlet in the 1930s when his spade struck rocks two metres down.
He cleared the immediate area and discovered that the rocks formed part of a wall...
... What they unearthed has been called the most extensive Neolithic site in the world, a farming community dating back to before 3,000 B.C.
Now a state-of-the-art visitor centre has been built on the site to showcase the C?ide Fields dig. Byrne is the manager. She takes a visitor on a walk over part of the site, on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, pointing out stone-walled fields, livestock enclosures, dwellings and tombs used by people at the dawn of recorded history.