Dr Noel McCarthy

speaker

129 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Dr Noel McCarthy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Talking History with Patrick Geoghegan · Neolithic Tombs In Galway · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

Well, the main overall project is designed to to look at the Mare Peninsula as a whole unit to see

How the landscape changes.

Obviously, the current excavation is looking at the very, very earliest farmers that come into the landscape.

But we do have evidence on the peninsula going back as early as the Mesolithic period.

So there's some artifacts from that time period.

So the project is to look at absolutely everything we can.

So it's not designed to be tied to a specific time period.

Um it's looking at the region, and it's a very interesting region.

Because it juts out into the eastern part of Galway Bay.

So it's in one way it's contained because it has sea on three sides, but on the flip side, it's very, very accessible because obviously that sea is then a perfect routeway to access the area while still being able to use land-based routeways to move inland.

Now, the interesting thing about Murray as well, it's actually

at the the western end of the Esquerida or the Schle Moor, so that ridge of um eskers that goes across the country and ties east and west of Ireland.

So we're at the very very western tip of that.

So Murray, although it appears today to be jutting out into the eastern part of Galway Bay,

is actually a very connected place to the wider world, particularly if you consider a seafaring or sort of a an uh a sea navigation route where you could go along the western coast of Ireland into the fairly um protected Galway Bay and then right up to the east end here where this the soils are actually very good on the peninsula.

You've good farmland and it would have been an attractive place to live across all parts of time.

Now, obviously Galway Bay has changed shape over the many, many millennia, going back to the Mesolithic period, but we would still never have been far from the sea, for example, because we have Muiloom Bay right beside us, which would have been at the very least a river leading to the Galway Bay as it was in the earliest times.

But um the project itself then

seeks to look at all of that right from the Mesolithic first people to the first farmers, right the way through then into the medieval period, where we have quite a few, actually a lot of ring forts in the early medieval period.

And then right up to almost to the modern period where we see modern building and m modern farming techniques changing the the local environment and the peninsula as we see it.

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