CHAPTER 1

Early Ulster
c. 7000 BC-AD 800

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IN 1888 IRISH ARCHAEOLOGISTS learned that worked flints dating back to the middle Stone Age had been found in a field behind Mount Sandel, an imposing Gaelic fort later strengthened by the Normans. Here, on a high bluff overlooking the lower Bann just south of Coleraine, over a hundred flint axe heads were collected in the years that followed but as more than two dozen other Mesolithic sites had been located, Mount Sandel was not thought to have any special significance. Then more flint tools were ploughed to the surface in 1972 when land was being prepared for a new housing estate. The following year Peter Woodman and his team of archaeologists began what seemed a routine investigation only to discover - after the carbon-14 dating of charred hazelnut shells - that human beings had dwelt here between 7000 and 6500 BC. The generally accepted date of the arrival of people in Ireland had been put back by more than a thousand years.

Humans had been living in Australia for some forty thousand years before the very first people set foot in Ireland. Arctic conditions made the Irish landscape too inhospitable until around nine thousand years ago: twenty-five million years ago temperatures across the world began to fall; polar caps formed twelve million years later; and from then on glaciers and ice sheets waxed and waned while the northern hemisphere experienced a succession of periods of intense cold. Fifteen thousand years ago, when eastern Ulster lay under ice ninety feet thick, a long melt began.

The last great ice sheet tore and pulverised rock from the mountains of Ulster as it advanced south, and then as it retreated it dumped this rubble as huge mounds of boulder clay in serried ranks in their tens of thousands. The geographer and prehistorian E. Estyn Evans has likened these to 'a necklace of beads some thirty miles wide suspended between Donegal Bay and Strangford Lough'. These low, rounded hills, known as drumlins, formed a frontier which did much to shape the future history of Ulster. In the lowlands drumlins blocked surface drainage routes and became surrounded by soft-margined loughs and treacherous fens: densely overgrown with wolf-infested thickets and separated by standing water, these later created a division between the northern province and the rest of Ireland. This barrier should not be overemphasised for it was never completely impenetrable; nevertheless, until the seventeenth century, easy access to Ulster from the south was only by the fords of Erne in the west and the Moyry Pass in the east - the gap that is the defile in the hills south of Slieve Gullion.

All the ice had disappeared by 11,000 BC and, as plants and animals once more invaded Ireland, bands of people began to migrate north from the Mediterranean region. Then a final and severe thousand-year cold snap, between 10,000 BC and 9000 BC, denuded the land of all but the hardiest plants such as mountain avens and purple saxifrage, which today hold out on the quartzite peak of Slieve League in County Donegal. Silt from this period from Drumurcher in County Monaghan has remains of beetles and arctic poppies, today strictly circumpolar in distribution. As the climate warmed thereafter, melting ice raised the sea level, but the land, relieved of its burden of ice, was rising even faster for a time. Land bridges connected Britain to the European mainland and Ireland to Britain. Archaeologists have yet to agree whether or not those glacial connections to Ireland had been swept away by the tides before human beings had reached Ireland. Even if the land bridges had been severed by 7000 BC, it was possible to travel by dry land far out west from Cumbria and beyond the Isle of Man before having to take to water and it was almost certainly from there that the first inhabitants of Mount Sandel came.

Ulster in the Stone and Bronze Age

For five seasons the site at Mount Sandel was meticulously excavated and its contents sieved, sifted and chemically analysed by specialists. Their findings cast a unique shaft of light back over nine millenniums on life in a Mesolithic camp in Ulster.

The slope of post holes showed that saplings had been driven into the ground in a rough circle and bent over to form a domed roof by being lashed together. Lighter branches may have been interwoven to add strength and rigidity; then each hut - there were four built at different times - was covered with bark or deer hide, and reinforced against north winds with grass turfs lifted from inside. Around seven yards wide, each hut gave shelter to perhaps a dozen people gathered round a bowl-shaped hearth in the centre. Charred fragments showed that this camp was perfectly sited to provide a living all year round.

As the sea level was around fifteen feet lower than it is today, the falls and rapids by Mount Sandel must then have made a majestic sight; below them, in early summer, salmon waited in thousands for a flood to take them upstream to spawn, and sea bass foraged at high tide in pursuit of crab, flounder and smolt. Scale-shaped flints found in abundance almost certainly had been set into poles to harpoon these fish, together with myriads of eels dropping down from Lough Neagh in autumn. Autumn, too, was the season for gathering hazelnuts and these were supplemented by crab apples, goosegrass, vetches and seeds of water lilies - these last, prized by Elizabethans for cooling the passions, resemble popcorn when dropped into hot fat. In midwinter wild pigs, fattened on the abundant hazel mast, began their rutting, and male yearlings, driven out by mature boars, were vulnerable then to hunting parties armed with flint-tipped spears and arrows. This, too, was the time for trapping birds in the forest and overwintering wild fowl; the archaeologists found bone fragments of eagle, goshawk, capercaillie, red-throated diver, widgeon, teal and some song birds.

Flint had to be carried from as far away as the beaches of Portrush in County Antrim and was made to give service for as long as possible. At a tool-working area to the west of the hollow, flint cores were roughed out and fashioned into axes, picks and adzes, while the smaller blades struck from them were shaped into knives, arrowheads, hide scrapers, awls and harpoon flakes. One axe had traces of red ochre on its surface, which gives a hint that these people painted themselves on ceremonial occasions.

From about 6500 BC the rains became more persistent, the temperature range narrowed, and, at Mount Sandel, oak, alder and elm began to tower over the hazel. Pine woods survived only on the uplands and, thus deprived of its habitat, the capercaillie became extinct in Ireland around 4000 BC. While investigating a site at Ballynagilly, near Cookstown, County Tyrone, in 1969, Arthur ap Simon noticed a fall in pollen from broad-leaved trees beginning around 3500 BC. Pollen is remarkably resistant to decay and is therefore invaluable in helping to explain the distant past. Alan Smith followed with a meticulous study of a bog at Fallahogy in County Londonderry by combining pollen counts with radiocarbon datings; in particular, he traced a sudden drop in elm tree pollen from about 3200 BC and a rise in traces of plantain, dock and nettle. In short, he was uncovering irrefutable evidence of the dramatic impact of pioneering farmers on Ulster's landscape.

Some time during the first half of the fourth millennium BC intrepid family groups began to venture across the North Channel to Ulster with their domestic stock. A thirty-foot currach can take a couple of cows with their calves or, alternatively, half a dozen pigs or sheep - the perils of crossing the sea in frail craft with frightened and thirsty horned beasts, even when firmly trussed, can be imagined. If anything, the journey would have been longer than today, for investigations at Ringneill Quay at Strangford Lough (where the earliest cattle, sheep and pig bones have been found in Ireland) show that the sea was then four yards higher than at present. On landing, the most urgent task was to find a stand of elm, the most reliable guide to good soil; as the men spread out through the wood girdling the trees with their stone axes, the women and children put up shelters and gathered leaves, twigs and fodder to carry the cattle through the first critical winter.

When the clearings lost their fertility, the farmers simply moved on to create new pastures. Flint was still highly prized but it shattered easily against tree trunks; much preferred for axes was porcellanite, formed sixty million years earlier when hot Antrim lavas poured over clays to bake and compress them into this hard china-like stone. Specialist factories emerged on Rathlin Island and at Tievebulliagh, County Antrim; the final polishing was painstakingly completed with sand and water on the seashore, notably at Whitepark Bay, and from there the axe heads were traded as far away as Dorset and Inverness.

It was at Ballynagilly that the oldest known Neolithic house in either Ireland or Britain was found. This rectangular dwelling, six and a half yards by seven yards, was made with radially split oak placed upright in trench foundations. Substantial posts evidently marked the position of thatched roof supports. Similar houses from the same period (about 3200 BC) have been found in central Europe, illustrating the steady movement of peoples westward, bringing with them knowledge of innovations such as cereal cultivation. Some corn was grown in Ulster, usually on light soils capable of being worked with a stone-headed mattock. Cattle predominated,...