Mount Sandel Mesolithic Site

The mound is an Iron Age fort, circa 500 BC. Given its location, the Normans probably palisaded and garrisoned it by knee-jerk reflex, but they never built a stone castle. But excavations around it in the 1970s revealed dwellings from 7000 BC, the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. These were ten tepees, with saplings bent into a framework then covered in hides, and with a central hearth. Although there's evidence of earlier human activity in Ireland, this is the earliest fixed "village"; it had been thought that Mesolithic people here were nomadic hunter-gatherers and that settled dwellings and agriculture only came later in the Neolithic or New Stone Age.