Mary Dillon

No, Richard, you're very much right.

Absolutely.

So when the first people arrived in the Burren, and we have evidence from County Clare from actually 12,500 years ago, just south of the Burren in Ennis.

But in the Burren itself, the evidence we have is from about 6,000 years ago.

We know from pollen diagrams that the Burren was absolutely covered in pine trees and hazel trees and other woodland.

And it was really when the first farmers arrived, just after 6,000 years ago, they would be

been the builders of the Púil na Bróin, which is dated to 5,800 years ago, they would have started to clear the land slowly.

It would have taken thousands of years, but they would have started to clear the land slowly.

And the soil was so thin that when they cut down the trees, it just blew away, giving us the landscape that we have today.

Of course, of course.

So a dolmen is what we call a megalithic monument.

And they were used by the first farmers, megalithic monuments, for both marking kind of their territory on the land and also for burying some of their dead.

And the dolmen is...

It's, how would you describe it?

It's got three sides and a large cap on it.

That's generally kind, and when I say cap, I mean a stone, that's generally kind of leaning.

The Púl na Bróin was excavated and the reason it was excavated, so archaeologists tend only to excavate where absolutely necessary because, you know, the remains are preserved in the ground and we don't want to be destroying everything.

There was...

a little bit of damage to Pulna Broan and they needed to kind of fix one of the stones, one of the support stones was cracked and that would have led the whole thing to collapse.

So while they were fixing this, they did an excavation, Dr. Anne Lynch,