Time BY BILL DALY
‘THE TIME YOU ENJOY WASTING IS NOT WASTED TIME’ – BERTRAND RUSSELL
I was watching a documentary recently in relation to the centenary of the War of Independence and my thoughts started to wander in the direction of my grand-uncles, Patrick and Michael Daly who left these shores in and around the early to mid 1920’s for New York, and were never to return. They both fought in the War of Independence with the Waterford 2nd Brigade Old IRA. However, things got a little complicated during the subsequent Civil War when they took opposing sides. Legend has it that my GreatGrandmother would take the guns from them when they arrived home for the weekend and told them to be civil to each other. She would return the guns to them when they left early on the Monday morning, on their separate journeys! When the documentary was over, I made a cup of tea, and started to think about the passage of time in a more general way. The 100 year time span of the documentary seemed a long way back when I was watching it, but in reality only a little speck in comparison to what I will now be relating to you for the remainder of this article. We would be most familiar with historical time, and that would concern the last two thousand years since the advent of Christianity. Before this we have archaeological time when mankind appeared on the scene, we do not have any historical records for the period and we have to forensically examine the landscape for clues. 54 | THE IRISH SCENE
Before this we have geological time, a time before mankind, and when the landscape features we are familiar with today were laid down. Ireland started off as two separate pieces of land separated by 5000 miles of ocean. The northern part was named Laurentia and the southern part was Avalonia. These two parts should never have met, but they did over 420 million years ago in a violent collision that shoved up our current mountain ranges. The Iapetus Suture is the seam from Loop Head in Co. Clare over to Clogher Head in Co. Louth where both parts joined together. Iapetus was the legendary father of Atlantis, after whom the Atlantic Ocean is named. Galway would have been in the northern Laurentia and Cork, Kerry and Tipperary in the southern Avalonia. In the early 1850’s when the Owenriff River and Lough Corrib in Oughterard were dredged, the equipment broke through the limestone rocks. Many of the stones which were removed could be used afterwards in the construction of the dry-stone walls we are familiar with today. I found some examples of Productic Brachiopods (see image) a few years ago on the banks of the Owenriff and these have embedded fossils which are 330 million years old. I was showing these to Roger Joyce one morning, and afterwards he brought me in an example of the Straparollus which he had previously found on his land (see image). The
