The witty and eccentric Dean Swift, remarking on the custom of writers of his day, said:—
“So geographers in Afric’ maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er inhabitable downs
Place elephants, instead of towns.”
It is strange how long this ignorance both as regards Ireland and the “Dark Continent” continued. One of the earliest names of Ireland, given her by her own native poets, is very descriptive, Fidh-inis, “the woody island.” This name at once brings before our minds the then characteristic feature of the country, even as its modern poetical designation, “The Emerald Isle,” depicts the luxuriant vegetation watered by the cloud-masses of the Atlantic. The bogs of Ireland, however, speak even more eloquently on this point than her bards, for in these bogs vestiges of ancient forests are found buried, sometimes at great depth below the present surface; the remains of oak, birch, mountain ash, alder, yew, beech, deal, &c., testify to the variety of the arboreous vegetation: they lie either prostrate in a horizontal position, or bear marks of having been felled by man. According to old bardic accounts, the first proceeding chronicled of the earliest settlers was the clearing of timber off many great plains in various parts of Ireland, evidently showing the paucity of arable land.
Wild Animals.—This continuous forest must have swarmed with wild animals of every description. Wolves, which even in the present day prove a scourge occasionally in parts of Europe, were numerous; the caves which abounded in the country were the home of the bear, and the boar fed beneath the deep forest shade. In these remote times, too, the Irish elk, with its huge, broad, branching antlers, a creature of immense size and strength, was existent. Remains of this gigantic deer, the Megaceros Hibernicus, have been found, covered by the peat at various depths, sometimes close to the surface; and from allusions in Irish poetry and legends[3] it is more than probable that it continued to exist down to a much later period than most of the other animals now extinct. In a very curious legend, one of the great Irish bards who is reputed to have lived in the third century, and to have himself attained a very advanced age, is described as reciting at a banquet a poem in which he extolled the greatness and strength of his contemporaries and forefathers, and described the tall gigantic deer hunted by them. His listeners laughed incredulously, whereat the old man rose in anger, and going to a neighbouring heap where were piled the relics of bygone hunts, he selected therefrom a shank-bone, and returning to the banquet, took from the table one of the shank-bones of the deer on which the guests were then feasting, and dropped it through the hollow of the bone he had brought in. This legend of the dim old times tends to prove that at a very remote period tradition alone kept up the memory of the Irish Bighorn.[4] The fact of the co-existence of the Megaceros with man does not, however, rest on mere legend; for in a locality called the “Elk Hole,” Co. Wexford, numerous skeletons of the extinct deer have been found in company with the remains of man, also a skull and horns, in the “kitchen midden” of the largest of the lake dwellings in Loughrea, Co. Galway, measuring over 13 feet from tip to tip of the antlers;[5] whilst in the refuse heap at Breagho, Co. Fermanagh, portion of an antler (according to the opinion of Professor Owen) was discovered, sawn and perforated with holes. It does not necessarily follow that this relic had belonged to an animal killed and utilized by the lake-dwellers; the horn may have been found by them on some spot where it had rested for ages. However, in the lake-dwelling at Cloonfinlough, Co. Roscommon, bones of the Megaceros Hibernicus have been dug up in a very broken state, as if fractured for the purpose of extracting the marrow, whilst remains of the Megaceros, in company with a greenstone celt, were discovered in a cave at Cappagh, the bones broken and formed into implements by the hands of man.[6] In Lough Gur, Co. Limerick, wherein is the site of a lake dwelling, remains of the Cervus tarandus, or reindeer,[7] were found, together with those of the bear; and near Ballybetagh, Co. Dublin, similar remains were associated with those of the Megaceros, whilst elsewhere bones of the Cervus alces, or true elk, have been exhumed, and traces of the mammoth, Elephas primigenius, have been found near Dungannon.
Climatic Changes.—If reliance can be placed on the accounts of classical writers, it would appear that two thousand years ago an excessive degree of cold prevailed in the climate of Europe. The great number and extent, of forests, lakes, and morasses, which according to classical authors existed in their time, must have rendered the climate of Europe exceedingly cold and moist. The forests have nearly all been felled, the stagnant water drained, thus producing a very considerable difference between the temperature described as existing in these latitudes 2000 years ago and in the present day. What occurred on the Continent occurred also in Ireland, which, shaded with forests and abounding in marshes, must have had an atmosphere more frigid than if its soil were then, as now, freely exposed to solar influence.
Claudian applied to Ireland the epithet ‘icy’: Strabo looked on it as a country scarcely habitable; Mela described the climate as cold and unfavourable: however, to counterbalance these authorities, it may be inferred from Tacitus that Ireland was considered milder in climate than Gaul; in that point of view Æthicus says it was superior to Britain, and Solinus states that it abounded in pastures. Owing to the disappearance of Erin’s former leafy mantle, and the absence of pestilential exhalations from stagnant fens, the summers have become much colder and the winters warmer than in remote times.
The turf-cutter in Ireland finds that “usually the roots and trunks of the trees under the peat, or in the lowest strata, are principally those of the oak and yew, as if prior to the growth of the peat the low country was a vast forest of these trees. It would appear that subsequently mosses and other peat-producing plants began to grow and flourish, until eventually they stopped the drainage, and formed an envelope of peat, thus killing the trees, which one by one toppled over and were buried in the succeeding growth of peat. After the disappearance of the major portion of the oak trees, the bogs, year by year, gradually increased in depth, until apparently suddenly, for some as yet unexplained cause, their growth ceased, and on their surface forests, principally of deals, sprang up.”[8] Thus we see that since the glacial period there have been great changes in the aspect and the surface of Ireland: first, the great oak forest age; then an age in which was an active growth of peat; thirdly, a period when forests of deal sprang up; fourthly, again a period of luxuriant peat growth.