Fermanagh History

Selected excerpts from the History & Heritage Guide.pdf (814KB)
By Iain Macauley.
© Fermanagh District Council

New Arrivals

About 12,000 years ago the ice, which had covered much of Ireland in the last Ice Age, was in full retreat and a lush meadowland was replacing the frozen, tundra landscape. Trees began to creep into the meadow – first juniper, then willow and birch, occasionally aspen and, on limestone soils, guelder rose – creating Ireland’s first woodlands. The melting ice left behind vast, shallow stretches of open water. A compressed compost of decaying plants collected at the shores of these loughs. Encouraged by the warm, wet

^{Lower Lough Erne. Photograph by Shay Nethercott.©Fermanagh County Museum.}

climate, the decaying material consolidated to form bogs, which extended out into the loughs. Early in this new post-glacial period, Ireland remained joined to Britain and it is conceivable that, not only did plants – especially the trees of Ireland’s new woodlands – and animals cross to Ireland over these land bridges, but also the first settlers. As the climate warmed, ice melted and sea levels rose; gradually Ireland became an island.

The first people arrived in Ireland over 9,000 years ago.It was around 6,500 years ago – late in the Middle Stone Age that people first came to Fermanagh. They found a landscape of wood and water. The woodland – alder, oak and elm on the lowlands, and birch and pine on the uplands – was tall and very dense and the water became their highway into and through the county. These Stone Age people were hunters and gatherers. Their hunting grounds were mainly at the water’s edge where they caught fish and wildfowl; they also hunted for small mammals of the woodland.
They harvested the wild nuts, berries and grasses, which grew around them to complete a resourceful and balanced diet.The relics, which these people left behind, are their stone tools.Very little else of their lifestyle, which was so ephemeral, has survived.At Cushrush Island on the eastern