Settlement platform, Lough Kinale, Co. Longford

Twelve metres across and rising only four tenths of a metre above the mud, it is easy to overlook, and for most of history it was. Excavations carried out in 2003 and 2004, however, revealed that this modest hump in the shallows had been visited, built upon, and returned to across an extraordinarily long stretch of time.

The platform is layered like a slow accumulation of decisions: peat and brushwood beneath, a stony surface on top. More than 15,000 stone artefacts were recovered, worked from flint, chert, and quartz, and most belong to the Mesolithic period, meaning they were fashioned by hunter-gatherers in the millennia before farming reached Ireland. Animal bone was found alongside them, dominated by wild pig, with some cattle also present. Spreads of ash and the remains of hearths showed that fires had been lit here on many separate occasions, and wooden stakes in the ground pointed to temporary structures of some kind, perhaps shelters thrown up for a season and then abandoned. The site may be the same as one recorded separately as a crannog, a type of artificial island built in lakes and rivers that was used extensively in early medieval Ireland, though the Kinale platform appears to have origins far older than the classic crannog tradition. A further crannog lies to the west-north-west across the water, suggesting this corner of the lough attracted human attention across a remarkable span of prehistory and early history.