An Irish Civil War Dugout Tormore Cave County Sligo – Marion Dowd (1)

3 Part of a finished chert tool was also discovered, a fragment of a convex scraper. These tools were used by prehistoric people for scraping activities such as cleaning animal hides. Convex scrapers are usually associated with the Neolithic (4,000–2,400 BC) and Bronze Age (2,400–800 BC) periods, suggesting a later phase of activity at Tormore Cave.

Chert is naturally abundant within the cave and on the rock face outside (Figure 6.3). This raises the possibility that prehistoric people visited the cave while on excursions into the mountains to source raw materials for making tools and implements. The cave would have provided shelter during such excursions. Tormore Cave exists at the contact point between the Upper Dartry Formation and the Lower Glencar Limestone Formation.

The latter does not contain chert, or at least chert of a workable quality. Thus, in order to access chert quarry sites in the region, an elevation equivalent to that of Tormore Cave would have been sought out. The stone tools from Tormore Cave attest to the presence of prehistoric communities in the wider environs of Glencar Lake (Figure 6.4).

A dense concentration of prehistoric chert tools, and debitage related to knapping chert for the manufacture of implements, was discovered in 2020 on the northern 3 Hogan et al. 2022 shore of the lake, also in Tormore townland. Hundreds of pieces of prehistoric worked chert were recovered, indicating that over thousands of years prehistoric people made multiple trips to the lake.

Here, chert was knapped and tools were manufactured and used, with the waste debris left behind on the lakeshore gravels. The lake would have been a very important hub over millennia, a place where prehistoric people came to catch fish and fowl, to bathe and to wash materials. Glencar Lake was also an important source of drinking water for people and animals. By boat, people could travel from the lake to the coast via the Drumcliff River. The communities living by the lake in prehistory would have been familiar with the mountainous environs.

On several different occasions, individuals or small groups discovered Tormore Cave and sheltered or lived there, leaving some of their chert tools and manufacturing debris behind.

© Marion Dowd, Robert Mulraney, James Bonsall, and Archaeopress 2024 Cover: ‘The Dartry plains’ by R. Mulraney This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. This book is available direct from Archaeopress or from our website www.archaeopress.com i Contents List of figures……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………iii List of tables…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………xviii Foreword………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

xix Michael MacDonagh List of contributors………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… xxi Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. xxii Glossary……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. xxv Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xxviii Note on terminology…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. xxix Timeline of principal events …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. xxxi Introduction Chapter 1: A Civil War dugout: archaeology, history, memory………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter 2: Landscape setting of Tormore Cave……………………………………………………………………………………11 History Chapter 3: Sligo in 1921-1923 and the historical context of the ‘Glencar hideout’………………………………….33 Chapter 4: Dugouts: an essential component of guerrilla warfare ………………………………………………………..81 Archaeology Chapter 5: Civil War modifications, built structures and features in Tormore Cave………………………………127 Chapter 6: Things left behind: artefacts found in Tormore Cave………………………………………………………….149 Chapter 7: Day to day life in the Tormore Cave dugout……………………………………………………………………….172 People & Memory Chapter 8: General Officer Commanding Billy Pilkington……………………………………………………………………187 Chapter 9: The men on the hills: the IRA billeted in Tormore Cave………………………………………………………227 Chapter 10: Support infrastructure: civilian women, Cumann na mBan and Protestant families …………..274 Chapter 11: Aftermath and legacies………………………………………………………………………………………………….298 Looking Forward Chapter 12: Towards an archaeology of the Irish Civil War…………………………………………………………………315 References and sources……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………321 ii Appendices Appendix 1: Archaeological context register…………………………………………………………………………………….333 Appendix 2: Archaeological finds register…………………………………………………………………………………………336 Appendix 3: Archaeological ecofact register……………………………………………………………………………………..339 Appendix 4: Photogrammetry, cave survey and laser scanning…………………………………………………………..340 Robert Mulraney, James Bonsall and Liamóg Roche Appendix 5: Geomorphological and geological setting, and mortar analysis………..

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 7a0209598d203e9c
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 23,296,720 bytes (22.217 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781803277691, 9781803277707
• Pages: 419
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 925.32 minutes
• Total Words: 185,064
• Total Characters: 1,179,316
• Average Words per Page: 441.68
• Average Characters per Page: 2814.6

Most Frequent Words

cave (1303), sligo (1136), ira (912), war (888), figure (780), tormore (695), pilkington (676), men (658), civil (584), national (479), one (448), dugout (444), branley (440), army (414), irish (407), billy (403), dowd (371), house (356), two (355), county (308), town (306), ireland (305), also (302), area (266), john (253), north (251), period (251), used (243), september (235), family (229), mchugh (222), time (221), pers (220), comm (220), james (215), independence (214), brigade (205), tom (197), years (196), trooper (192), between (186), mountain (184), glencar (181), three (181), archaeological (180), paddy (179), home (179), later (177), six (174), bones (171), known (170), military (168), dugouts (163), mulraney (162), rahelly (161), safe (161), likely (159), townland (158), many (156), msp (156), ref (156), recording (155), entrance (154), floor (152), local (150), valley (149), made (144), part (143), frank (143), scanlon (142), sheep (141), audio (140), however (140), robert (139), left (139), bonsall (138), following (138), arms (135), dublin (135), now (134), day (131), mountains (131), small (131), west (129), jack (129), four (129), chris (126), first (126), marion (124), run (124), state (124), took (123), early (123), located (122), within (122), south (121), western (119), devins (117), division (116), barracks (115).

PDF Download