Céide Fields Mayo
The Ceide Fields on the north Mayo coast near Ballycastle is the most extensive prehistoric landscape in the world, a Neolithic farming system of field walls, house sites and megalithic tombs buried beneath the blanket bog of the north Mayo uplands approximately 5,500 years ago and preserved intact beneath the peat in a completeness impossible on any surface site. The fields were discovered in the 1930s by a local schoolteacher and subsequently excavated over several decades by archaeologist Seamas Caulfield, revealing a system of enclosed fields extending over approximately 12 square kilometres in a regular pattern that demonstrates the organised agricultural society of the Irish Neolithic.
The Ceide Fields Visitor Centre, perched dramatically on the clifftop above the Atlantic with views of the north Mayo coast extending to the Belmullet Peninsula, provides the interpretation and the context for understanding a site that is largely invisible on the surface. The probing of the bog with iron rods to map the buried walls, the principal technique of the excavation programme, is demonstrated to visitors and the evidence recovered from beneath the peat, including the walls themselves and the pollen record of the ancient agricultural landscape, brings the Neolithic world of north Mayo into vivid focus.
The coastal cliffs below the visitor centre are among the most dramatic on the Mayo coast, the horizontal limestone strata dropping vertically to the sea in a series of cliff faces that provide breeding habitat for a variety of seabirds and some of the finest coastal scenery available on the Wild Atlantic Way.