Field trip to Sligo

Our four day field trip with the Belfast Naturalists field club was a great success. Blue skies and sunshine lasted for four full days.

We started by visiting the Cavan Burren- a limestone area near Blacklion which is just across the border from Enniskillen. 

Then Glencar waterfall where we met with Michael Bell who opened his moth trap. 

Hence to Sligo where we had an evening guided walk of the town.

Day two took us to Mullaghmore with Michael Bell and Leo Leydon. A walk on the dunes produced a Forester moth [photo by Michael Bell]

 

Also small Heath butterflies and later on Streedagh Strand the rare small blue butterfly.  We also studied the geology of Mullaghmore Head. 

Streedagh strand is the site of four Armada wrecks. 

Next to the amazing Ballyconnell coast with limestone shelving covered with well preserved fossils of sea animals. This limestone was laid down when Ireland was 10° south of the equator.   

 

In the evening Dr Sam Moore gave a highly interesting talk on the pre history of Sligo which has the greatest number of Neolithic monuments in Ireland and which pre-date those in England. 

The next day we visited Knocknarea glen then onto Carrowmore Megalith Cemetery below Queen Maebh's cairn. 

There were up to 65 tombs here although only 30 remain. 

 

Visited Slish Wood on the edge of Lough Gill. 

On our last day we first visited Arigna Coal Mine. Closed in 1992 but now opened as a visitor experience. My first visit to a coal mine. The seams here are only 18" deep and very difficult to work. Miners lay on their sides in a narrow shelf - say only 30” high and shovelled coal in heaps as they worked towards the buggies that took the coal out. It was a horrific working life in dangerous, cold, wet conditions with water streaming down through the rocks. 

Our final visit was to a workhouse at Bawnboy which is being restored by some locals, as they get some money, as part of Irish history. The driving force is Dympna who is about to publish a book saying that the reason for the famine was the workhouses and the Poor Laws which forced people who couldn't pay the punitive landlord taxes into  workhouses ...which were like jail. There was no escape. Children were taken from their mothers at the age of 3 and put into separate accommodation. Girls, boys, men and women all separate and forbidden to communicate with each other. 

Anyway by this time of the day at least 10 people were suffering from food poisoning..me included so we were glad someone else  was driving us home.