Heritage Week Talk with Pádraig McAvock

Climate change has been happening for millennia in North Mayo, given our location on the edge of the Atlantic. It is the changes in climate that has enabled the preservation of the Céide Fields. The fields were built nearly 6,000 years ago at a time of drier and warmer conditions allowing a community of cattle farmers to flourish. Later climate conditions worsened, enabling the blanket peat to develop. Another drier phase around 5,000 years ago allowed a natural forest of pine trees to spread across the bog. The vast tracts of uninhabited blanket peat today are a result of our constantly damp climate.
The weather patterns on the smaller timescale of our own lifetimes are also changing.

Pádraig McAvock has spent his lifetime recording the weather for Met Éireann at Belderrig on the North Mayo coast just west of Céide Fields. With decades of experience as a fisherman on the wild Atlantic he is acutely aware of the significance of the changing weather.
Hear his fascinating insights into the changing patterns of weather in the last four decades.