Tramore of Yore

Reverend Power in his book ‘the Place-Names of the Decies’, published in 1907, notes that, Tramore Burrow shows ‘traces of occupation by a prehistoric race’ in the form of kitchen middens, which he thought were possibly from the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age. He further elaborated that ‘Kitchen middens are sometimes exposed after storms, and cores and flakes, as well as fragments of red-deer antlers &c., are found from time to time.’ Kitchen or Shell middens are essentially the remains of combined cooking areas and rubbish dumps, large mounds of burnt shell and bones, sometimes accompanied by the remains of worked stone tools. There are two located at the isthmus and another two on the north side of the Burrows. One of the ones on the isthmus is a large area of broken and burnt shells on black ground measuring roughly 12 metres by 8 metres. Perhaps there are some yet to be identified and others lost to the vagaries of time.

In fact, these Tramore middens are most likely of Mesolithic origin. Mesolithic simply means Middle Stone Age. After the end of the last Ice Age, circa 10000 BC, a warmer climate, rising sea levels and the scarcity of large mammals to hunt, forced hunter gatherer societies to adapt over time to a new way of life, targeting smaller prey and often looking to the sea for bounty. Of course, people were probably relying extensively on the sea for a source of food for thousands of years previously, but the evidence of them is lost as the coastlines of palaeolithic occupation are now underwater. Certainly, the physical landscape was often very different to what we know today as sea levels waxed and waned. In 1894 while carrying out the necessary excavations for the new sea wall, workmen discovered the roots of more than a dozen large trees with portions of the trunks attached that were in situ along the line of the transverse and had to be removed. Several of the roots torn from this bed weighed as much as 15 cwt or ¾ of a ton. Observers were left in no doubt that in the dim past a forest or very large wood stood on the shoreline.

There is now a lot of evidence of coastal settlement in the south of Ireland in the Mesolithic period and so it is not surprising that the first evidence for human habitation in Tramore dates from this time. Richard J Ussher, the author of ‘Birds of Ireland’ visited Tramore prior to 1900, where among the sand-hills he encountered ‘extensive kitchen-middens, containing layers of shells of oysters and cockles with limpets, mussels and other shells, charcoal, burned stones which he surmised were ‘split from use as pot-boilers’, and bones of domestic animals and fowl, with bones and horns of red deer.’ Among these objects, which were on the surface, he, and his companions ‘found in different places, seventeen bones of Great Auk, comprising eight coracoids, five humeri, one tibia, two metatarsals and one pelvic bone. In one case a right and a left humerus were found together.’ It was determined by Dr Gadow of Cambridge that the remains of the Great Auks represented at least six individual birds and led to the conclusion that the Great Auk was used for food by the people who created the kitchen middens. The question then arose as to how they could have procured so many of those oceanic birds. Ussher speculated that they had originated on a low flat island that may have existed in the bay and had since been washed away.

Apparently, there is also evidence for the Mesolithic use of a prehistoric stone quarry, partially excavated at Monvoy in 1989, where clusters of Rhyolite artefacts and some flint tools were found in relation to a Rhyolite ridge. This quarry would have seen ancient masons break rocks from the ridge into workable sections and then crafting the rocks into artefacts such as hammerheads, blades, and arrowheads. Rhyolite is a somewhat unusual stone material, much rarer than Flint. However, the only flint locally available were pebbles from the seashore. An excavation of the middens in the Burrows could reveal whether or not they made use of tools crafted in Monvoy.