Prehistoric site - lithic scatter, Clonmannan, Co. Wicklow

The moraine, a ridge of debris deposited by retreating glacial ice, runs east to west and has been cut short by the sea, meaning the land itself is eroding away. Whatever once lay further out is gone, and what survives on the exposed surface represents only a fragment of a larger picture.

Among the flints collected here is material with a possible Later Mesolithic character, placing some of the activity at this spot in the broad period between roughly 7000 and 4000 BC, when Ireland was inhabited by small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers who left behind little beyond stone tools and the occasional shell midden. Mesolithic flint scatters are not always legible to the casual eye, the tools being small blades and microliths rather than the more recognisable arrowheads of later periods, but they carry genuine weight as evidence of the earliest sustained human presence in the country. The site at Clonmannan came to attention through the work of Professor F. Mitchell and Professor P. Woodman, two figures central to the development of Irish prehistoric and Quaternary studies, and their involvement suggests the material was assessed with some care rather than logged in passing.