Jessica Cooke

Archaeological monuments never exist on their own. Ancient farmsteads such as ringforts lie alongside Stone Age passage-tombs, Bronze Age fulachta fiadh or cooking pits, Crannóga or lake-island dwellings, early roads, pilgrimage paths and the monasteries of early Christian saints. With the coming of the Anglo-Normans, castles were also raised, especially in Connacht. Explore how to identify monuments in the local landscape, how they relate to each other, how they date from different time periods, and how they served the successive communities who created them.

In the 1930s the Folklore Commission of Ireland gathered béaloideas or oral history from national school children, and from the oldest inhabitants across the country. Though they were collected hundreds - sometimes thousands - of years after prehistory and the Middle Ages, these stories can preserve memories of the earliest myths and history of their localities, such as battles of the gods, encounters with the sidhe or fairies, or attacks by Vikings. 

Explore how important it was to local and rural communities in Ireland to preserve and pass on the oral history of their landscape, at a time before the availability of infinite information on the internet and social media.