Border Collies herding sheep in a 5000-year-old stone age enclosure in Ireland

Border Collies herding sheep in 5000-year-old Neolithic enclosure in the Burren, County Clare, Ireland

Angus Marshall-Smith is the sheepdog in our family and did not get to come along on my sister Kitty's visit to Ireland.  However, Kitty and I were excited when we learned of sheepdog demonstrations at Caherconnell Stone Fort and Sheepdog Demonstrations.  (If you follow the link, they have a little video of the dogs herding sheep.) We rushed on over despite the unseasonably cold weather.  About 30 miles from where we are staying near the Atlantic, it is on the eastern edge of the Burren among many of the very important Neolithic archeological sites, but those are posts for a different day. To our delight, the field where the demonstration was held was part of the Neolithic living complex, inhabited from about 5000 years ago by people who herded sheep and cattle, too.

John Darven was our host and was as careful of us as of his sheep and dogs. His family have been running sheep and cattle at this site for 300 years, and he hopes the next generation can carry on too.

Three dogs were working:  Sally, emeritus, is an 18-year-old collie/cattle dog mix whose job was to watch over the visitors in the shelter.  Not that hard--we were the only visitors.  The other two dogs are border collies: Lynn, 8-years-old and master of her craft; and Lee, 4-years-old and still learning though quite skilled.  They were the ones who herded the sheep at John's commands.

John tells us that the dogs learn voice commands first and within about 6 weeks can follow the easy ones like left or right. Once they learn to follow voice commands they learn to follow whistles since they work out in the hills and may be as much as a mile from the shepherd.  Each dog knows her own name and each has a unique whistle note so each dog can be told to do a different thing.

When out in the Burren for pasture, the sheep do not need to be watched constantly.  But for lambing season, generally February and March, the dogs stay with them to guard against predators.  Foxes and pine martens are the main worry and are enough of a problem that sometimes people also have to stay with the lambs.

This farm is a dairy farm too and dogs like Sally herd the cows using a different, more forceful technique.  Since the season is unusually cold and wet the cows are still in the barns being fed rather than being able to go out to grass as they should be doing in May.  Visitors do not require a forceful technique and Sally was kindly toward us. We noted that visitors can usually plan on a little sun too and John agreed that the tourist-trade is way down because of the weather. The rain is only good for Sally since she only has a few tourists to watch over and can take it easy.

Caherconnell Fort is a Neolithic living area which remains quite intact.
In modern times it has been a sheep and cattle farm as it remains today,
famous for its cheese among other products.
Sheepdog demonstrations take place daily, even today,
when it is really windy and rainy and we are the only tourists.

Sally is a collie/cattle dog mix, 18 years old.
She gets to stay in the shelter with us while her two younger co-workers herd sheep for us.

We have a shelter for watching but it is pretty windy and rainy anyway.
Sally's job is to watch over us.

Sheep are in a stone-enclosed yard which contains remnants of the Neolithic farmstead.
They are herded through a series of fences and back to the center.

More sheep, more Neolithic remains.
The sheep are far away so have to be guided by whistles rather than voice.

Bringing in the last sheep to the field pen.
The dogs go around in opposite directions to get them to bunch up.

Sheep in the field pen which is part of the Neolithic stone fort.
(Sorry--too rainy to walk out to photograph the major remains.)

Looking for the one who got away.

Got it.

Sheep successfully penned, keeping a wary eye on the dogs.

We are able to get in out of the rain and dry off.  Kitty drinking tea; raincoats dripping.
As soon as we finished our tea, the sun came out.

Angus, home in Alaska, waiting for a called-in report on the sheep.

Puffins and the Cliffs of Moher Seabird Festival, Ireland

Atlantic Puffin in Ireland. (Photo is from the internet, not ours.) Thousands nest on the Cliffs of Moher, one of few places they can be seen on a mainland.

Puffins are the stars of the Cliffs of Moher Seabird Festival which just finished this week.  We participated in several events and visited on our own, too.  Thousands--really, thousands--of puffins, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, fulmars and other birds are nesting on these cliffs which provide excellent nesting habitat on the edge of the Eurasian continent.  Looking west the Aran Islands are within view.  Next stop, Newfoundland.

Be still my heart.  I just love this stuff and the festival provided me with biologists and rangers to give me all the info I could absorb. I spent time with Jamie, a volunteer from Birdwatch Ireland looking from above.  Then we took a boat trip to the bottom of the cliffs with a bird specialist from the staff of the Cliffs of Moher.  While the formal festival is over, the birds will be there for about 2 more months and I will watch them often.

Cliffs looking south.  All the white stripes are where birds nest.  Sea stack and puffin nesting island are in the middle.

The cliffs are about 8 miles long, a remnant of silt-stone from the end of the ice ages when giant rivers laid down rock.  At the tallest point they are 700 feet high. The rock feels the full force of the North Atlantic and crumbles away leaving cliffs, spires, stacks and many ledges which are the perfect real estate for the seabirds.  Predators have a hard time getting to the nests because they are on cliff faces--good for baby birds.  The sea has fish of every size, easy to feed adults and babies. Puffins nest in little tunnels in the dirt on top of the little islands so fewer places meet their requirement to be safe from minks or other mammals who want the eggs or babies.  The razorbills, guillemots and some others lay eggs right on the rocks so they can find ledges and nest along more of the cliffs.

Usually puffins and the others spend their time out in open water so we have to be here during their nesting time to see them near land--thus the festival.  They are nesting now but the babies are not born yet--come back in a few weeks to see the young.  The adults will feed them in the nest, then the babies will fly as far as the water, basically down.  Not too hard for them.  They sit on the water and learn the key skill of diving for dinner.  After a few weeks, they have that taped and then they learn to fly. We will be here for about another month so will see parts of the cycle.

From above, the grassy area is the best puffin nesting habitat.
We watched them fly in and out and also feeding on the waters below.

Closer view of the nesting area for the guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes..

Even closer.  Kittiwakes claim the lowest ledges.  The upright birds on the middle levels, which look like penguins are either razorbills or guillemots.  No penguins in the North Atlantic but these birds fit into a similar ecological niche.
Fulmars on top--they look like gulls but are not.

Mixed flock.  They dive from a swimming position to get fish.  They may dive 50 to 100 feet.

Us with Cliffs of Moher Ranger and bird-expert, Cormac, on a boat ride below the cliffs.

This is a famous surfing venue too.  We plan on no surfing adventures.

Text by Julianne. Photos mainly by Nancy.

Burren: geosite and rock garden along the Wild Atlantic Way, Ireland

The Atlantic continuing to erode the dark shale (above), exposing the pale limestone (top).

Burren limestone with glacial erratic.

Glaciers scraped away soil and shale lawyers, rain and Atlantic waves eroded the limestone, tiny plants colonized the fissures.  Earliest human habitation in Ireland here too.  This is the Burren.

The Burren, County Clare, Ireland is a European Geopark protecting a unique natural and archeological environment on the westernmost edge of the Eurasian continent.  The earth surface was scraped by glaciers, leaving limestone never covered by later soil or rock.  As a national park, it is protected and in spring becomes a rock garden of tiny flowers.  Seabirds nest in the southern part of the area at the Cliffs of Moher.  Stone chats and rock pipits make a precarious living in the windy fields.

For us, a Saturday wander north of our house in Doolin brought us to the very southern tip of the limestone, where the glaciers dropped their erratic boulders.  May is bringing the rock garden of tiny flowers.

The area is a center for traditional music, food specialties and much more.  Archeological sites are from about 10,000 years ago to the famine of the 1840's. The west coast of Ireland is designated The Wild Atlantic Way, a glorious scenic drive; the Burren is midway, just south of Galway. We are here for awhile and will have time to find out much more. Today, we delight in tiny flowers.

 

Text by Julianne.
Photos by both of us.

Neolithic Carnac, France's Stonehenge

This world is but a canvas to our imagination - Henry David Thoreau

Le Menec Alignment

I saw the Carnac standing stones about 15 years ago with my friend Rob. I remember him standing staring, trying to feel his way into the thinking of people who would set up thousands of big stones into long rows. The picture above shows just a few of the stones in the Alignments there in Carnac, France. Long rows side by side, they march with little regard to terrain across the countryside by the hundreds and thousands, kilometers of them, some damaged, some missing, but principally still in place over 5,000 years after being raised. 

They puzzle the mind. What did they mean, when they meant something? 

By 5,700 years ago (or so) the farming peoples who came to the Carnac area had cleared the land, ploughed the soil, planted wheat. They began raising these stones, called menhirs. They moved them across the landscape and set them up without the wheel, without engineers, without geometry. Mainly they made lines, and sometimes circles, ovals, and rectangles. In addition they made graves lined with slabs of stone and covered with soil and grasses. They didn't build stone houses. They did what they did for a couple thousand years, approximately, and then they stopped. 

Photo credit: Wikipedia, Yolan Chériaux

The stones are big, very heavy, and we can assume it took tremendous cooperative energy over many years to dig out, transport, and set them up. Many people have speculated about them, and Wikipedia and other internet sites give a lot of information about them. A new book on the topic is La Revolution Neolithique en France, edited by Jean-Paul Demoule, 2014. In English, we found The Carnac Alignments: Neolithic Temples, by Jean-Pierre Mohen, 2011 (2000).

Who, what, where, when, and how can be addressed with archaeology and careful reasoning. But in looking at the stones, and in looking at what's been written about them, the "Why" escapes us. Most efforts at understanding focus on presumed religious rituals. Other ideas include political power, property rights, honoring the dead, and expressions of family or clan totems. One of my friends, joking, proposed space aliens. Well.

Le Menec, a set of alignments, looking west. You can see that some lines are 
broken. The house and barn show you where the missing stones went.

Alignments of stones seen from the side. 

More than 5000 menhirs have been counted. The smallest are the size of an end-table; the largest are not really big if you are comparing with Stonehenge. Le Menec stones top out at about 9', the Kerzerho alignment stones at about 15'. Of course, it's a job to move around even a 5 ton menhir, and these can weigh 30 tons, 50 tons. But really the amazing thing is their number, and their sort of relentless progress across the landscape. 

Julianne and standing stones at Kerzerho

The stones are set about equidistant from each other, measured from their centers. This surprised researchers once they noticed it. The average distance between centers, measured with some precision in the 1970s, is 2.5 yards. This has been named the "Neolithic fathom."

We had a week at Carnac, enough to see some but not all alignments. We rented bicycles, and eventually we rented a car to get to some farther groups. We visited ones named Le Menec, Kermario, and Kerlescan, which get the most attention, and they are busy places, with parking lots, restaurants, a little train to take you around. The town of Carnac is doing well at hotels and souvenir shops and developments along the beach. It's a cheerful place, and we liked it. But not all alignments are equally popular, you might say. The farther ones get much less focus, in the tourist literature especially.

At last we spent some time at the Petit Menec alignment. It was our hands-down favorite. It's off the beaten track, down a one-lane road, and could be called neglected. We, however, thought it was perfect. 

Ink sketch from among the stones of the Petit Menec. copyright Nancy Donnelly 2015.

There's a single parking place, marked by a trash can. You have to walk through woods on a not-very-traveled path threatening to dissolve into wild strawberry vines which are spreading everywhere among the trees. The trees are mainly slender but tall, reaching for light. The birds are singing. The little leaves are appearing in their lovely spring green. Sunshine falls through the leaves making dappled patterns on the tree trunks, the vines, the little bushes, the grass, the stones. A tiny breeze rustles the leaves.

There's a low dry-stone wall which you can navigate by sitting on it and swinging your legs over. The woods continue, and stones appear in lines. The stones are not very big, and the lines are not complete, and not exactly straight. They march along, make a dog-leg right and continue some distance, then stop. We sat on the wall, picking a place with few mosses. We had our sandwiches and our white wine. I think I had some vegetable. Julianne was tired and stayed put, while I walked into the woods among the stones and sat to draw.

The underbrush at the Petit Menec stays small because of the shade, and the stones are full of mosses. It's quite moist here, even marshy in one place, and beautifully dim. My paper was smaller than I wished (6x12), and I was sitting on a rock. It's always something, isn't it?

The alignments are not the only way Neolithic people used big stones. That day we went to the Petit Menec, I also visited Le Manio, the largest still standing stone, about 21' tall, and off by itself though close to a rectangular enclosure of small stones. 

Le Manio, 21' tall. It stands alone, but in line 
with the eastern set, the Kerlescan, 
and close to a rectangular enclosure of stones.

There was once a taller menhir, too. The Grand Menhir Brise at Loc Mariaquer is 20 meters long (about 65'), broken into four pieces. It used to be one of a string a large menhirs, all of which were destroyed during the Neolithic past. Evidently they were brought down on purpose, to re-use the stones in building dolmens. 

Grand Menhir Brise, 

Here's a picture of a dolmen right in the middle of Carnac. It has been appropriated to religion with the cross on top, but that's relatively new.

Dolmen among houses in Carnac, with me.
Credit: photo by Julianne Duncan

This is a tomb. There are many of them, constructed like houses with vertical slabs of stone topped by flat slab roofs, then covered with rocks and soil until they were grassy mounds. Bodies were buried within. These are called dolmens if they are small, and cairns if they are big multi-family affairs. 

Over the centuries the smaller ones especially were revealed by erosion. Cairns yielded skeletons, jewelry, stone weapons and tools, bowls and grinders, now in the museum at Carnac, but the exposed dolmens were found empty. Here's a fast sketch I made of the cairn at Gavrinis. I would have taken a photo, but they take away your camera and everything hard or floppy during the visit. It's true the space is very narrow and low, and something like a camera swinging could chip the stone. The slab walls are covered with symbols presumed to represent human figures among other things. 

Entrance to Gavrinis cairn. copyright Nancy Donnelly 2015

Carving on dolmen stones inside Gavrinis, thought to represent human forms
Credit: knowth.com via Wikimedia Commons

Carvings of stone knives and other shapes, Gavrinis.
Credit: visoterra.com

Stone knives now in the museum at Carnac. Jade from northern 
Italy. These knives were status symbols, not for use.
They are thin and fragile, about 8" long. They are
tokens of hierarchy, and a result of long-distance trade.
Credit: photo Julianne Duncan

It's not hard to figure out what the cairns and dolmens were used for, and we can easily understand evidence of hierarchy, long-distance trade and the excellent skill in making these artifacts. These people were more sophisticated than we gave them credit for, at first. 

But understanding the standing stones is not very easy. They present an enigma; the aesthetic escapes us. They're lumpy, hardly ever have carving on them, and are not very similar to one another in size. Sometimes there's a run of big ones, and sometimes there's a run of smaller ones. Otherwise, there might have been rules or principles for choosing suitable stones, but we can't make them out. They seem like humble objects, chosen by convenience. 

In an odd way, they don't even seem like the point. Maybe something else was the goal.

I'm going to hazard a different guess. Perhaps admiration attached to the skill in moving and raising these outrageously heavy objects. Perhaps the stone-raising itself was a statement of prowess, and the actual stone had no further use. Maybe that's why the peoples in the area of Carnac had to keep raising more and more of them. 

Maybe it was a sort of sport. A competition defining who was strongest and most clever. At Carnac we might be looking mainly at expressions of strength, hierarchy, pride, and competition. 

This is likely a heretical view. Modern people search for meaning everywhere. The idea that the meaning of the alignments is transitory and has to be established over and over, constantly renewed, isn't in line with other people's ideas. I'll stick with it until a more convincing argument comes along. I'm open to a better argument.

by Nancy, also photos unless otherwise cited