We have to imagine the early farming communities of Ireland clearing areas of a dense oak and elm forest in order to plant crops and let their animals graze. While setting fire to the forest will achieve this to a certain extent, there is no substitute for cutting down trees - not to make ploughing easier but to allow sunlight in to help the crops grow. In these forest clearances houses would be built, the first proper farmhouses to be found in Ireland. The most substantial is that found at Ballyglass in Co. Mayo where, below a megalithic tomb, a house over 13m long was uncovered. This house was so substantial that some of the posts were set in holes 70cm deep; the framework of the house must have been carried on posts the thickness of telegraph poles. At Ballynagilly in Co. Tyrone, the walls of another house were made of split oak planks. It is sobering to think that most of Ireland's Stone Age farmers lived in dwellings which were better than those in which much of the country's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century population had to live.

Perhaps the most obvious sign of a change was the appearance of large burial monuments, usually referred to as megalithic tombs. The name ultimately derives from the tendency to use large slabs of rock (Mega-Lithos) to build the chambers and kerbs of these monuments. Even today, well over 1,000 megalithic tombs of differing sizes survive on the Irish landscape. These range from the rectilinear court tombs usually defined by a court area at one end, through the circular passage tombs to the small portal tombs (often called dolmens) and finally to the rather enigmatic wedge tombs.

Probably no other country in Europe is so well endowed with megalithic tombs. Many are scattered over the landscape in such a fashion that they could be seen as more than places where the dead were simply disposed of. They may have been important monuments for the living, giving communities of scattered farmers a focal point. In fact, while many of these tombs have contained a number of bodies, many of the dead may have been disposed of elsewhere. We know from Britain, for example, that in certain areas the dead could be left exposed in some of the hill-top enclosures called causewayed camps. One British archaeologist reckons that we would have the remains of over 600 bodies if he had excavated the whole of one enclosure in Dorset. Therefore, tombs like Ireland's northern court tombs or portal tombs, sites such as Audleystown court tomb or Slidderyford dolmen, may be the expression of something more than a ritual associated with the dead. In fact in some cases, the burial ritual may have included rites which ended with only part of the body being placed in the tomb - possibly in certain instances, only the vital organs.

In this light, it is interesting to note that, at Donegore Hill, Co. Antrim, J. P. Mallory of Queen's University, Belfast, has recently been excavating the first certain Neolithic causewayed enclosure to be found in Ireland. Unfortunately, it is an area of acid rocks, so no traces of bones have been recovered. Is this an exposure site for the dead or is it a defended enclosure to protect families from the land-hungry depradations of their neighbours? Some British examples have been found covered in leaf-shaped arrowheads obviously fired in volleys by attackers. We know that these large enclosures were being built within the first half of the Neolithic so is it not possible, with a more settled lifestyle and possibly even an increase in fertility, that there was a very rapid expansion in farming in Ireland within a few hundred years of its arrival.

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From the Appletree Press title: The People of Ireland (currently out of print).
Also see A Little History of Ireland.