Beara Peninsula Research Articles

Holocene vegetation and flora dynamics of the west Cork/Kerry region, south-western Ireland

AbstractSediments from a small lake, Loch Beag, in Barrees, Beara peninsula, south-western Ireland, provide a record of vegetation history that spans most of the Lateglacial and Holocene (14–0.43 ka). The detailed part of the record relates to the Holocene, which is the focus of this paper. The investigations carried out include pollen and macrofossil analyses, loss-on-ignition measurements and 14C dating. As well as providing records for tree and shrub taxa, and especially Pinus, Quercus, Ulmus, Fraxinus and Taxus, other taxa mainly with Atlantic and/or Lusitanian distributions are also considered. These include Arbutus unedo (strawberry tree) and fern species such as Osmunda regalis, and the filmy ferns Hymenophyllum tunbrigense, H. wilsonii and Trichomanes speciosum (Killarney fern). Detailed records for a suite of bog/heath taxa, including ericoid species (Erica tetralix and E. cinerea), Narthecium ossifragum, Hypericum elodes and Myrica gale, are presented. The results of 14C dating of bog-pines from western Ireland are summarised. Results of other investigations, including key Holocene pollen diagrams, and charcoal and fossil-wood records from archaeological excavations that relate mainly to the Bronze Age in the wider west Cork/Kerry region, are reviewed. Vegetation dynamics, human impact and plant biogeography are discussed in the light of the considerable data now available for the region.

A review of the ecology and status of the Kerry Lily Simethis mattiazzii (S. planifolia) Asphodelaceae in Ireland

The distribution, habitat and genetic diversity of Irish populations of the Kerry Lily (Simethis mattiazzii) are described. All sites known in 2009, centred around Kenmare Bay in SW Ireland, were sampled. The species occurs in a relatively uniform plant community, classified as 4030 Dry Heath within a low-lying coastal heath complex. A preliminary genetic investigation involving analysis of 21 chloroplast and nuclear gene regions revealed no genetic diversity in the samples examined, suggesting that the species in Ireland comprises a number of meta-populations, within one large, single population confined to the Derrynane area on the Iveragh peninsula in South-west Kerry (v.c.H1) and one on the north of the Beara peninsula, across Kenmare Bay from Derrynane, in West Cork (v.c.H3). A sixth site, at Cahergarriff on the south of the Beara Peninsula has since been discovered. Of the 5,750 flowering plants recorded in 2009, the biggest meta-population, which also had the highest plant density, numbered 2,364, on Abbey Island, near Derrynane. Results from two brief surveys in 2020 indicate that the populations have reduced in extent and size since 2009. The genetic results so far suggest that the species is genetically depauperate in Ireland, such that the Irish populations may in fact be only represented by a single, or narrow, founder genotype and may be the result of a one-off introduction. The potential mode of arrival of the species to Ireland is discussed in relation to trade with continental Europe, where its distribution is greatest in SW France and western Iberia. A follow-up genetic study is required to confirm these results and explore a putative point of origin for the species in Ireland. Conservation issues are addressed in the light of these observations.

The vein-hosted copper deposits of the Allihies mining area, SW Ireland; a new structural and chronological evaluation

This paper presents new data for historical vein-hosted copper sulfide deposits in the Late Paleozoic Munster and South Munster basins of SW Ireland. Detailed mapping, 3D modelling, fluid inclusion microthermometry and geochronology from the Allihies area of the Beara Peninsula have led to a new interpretation of the timing and development of ore mineralization. Macro- and microstructural studies reveal that the ore-bearing, mainly east–west-striking quartz veins are directly related to early extensional, basinal normal faults. Molybdenite Re–Os dating of the main-stage Cu lode yields ages from 367.3 ± 5.5 to 366.4 ± 1.9 Ma. This early vein system experienced subsequent late Carboniferous Variscan deformation, including cleavage development, sinistral SW–NE strike-slip faulting, cataclastic deformation and recrystallization. The new timing of Cu mineralization in SW Ireland has major implications for its relationship to the base metal deposits of the Irish Midlands. Supplementary material: A video file showing a 3D model of the major lodes and the underground workings at Mountain Mine, and Excel spreadsheets showing fluid inclusion measurements and sample locations of the Allihies Copper Mining District are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4875015

Prins by César Aira

The book’s subtitle, “Other Stories from a New Europe,” is a nod to the complex city of Berlin. Fitzgerald writes, “New Europe was a shifting kaleidoscope, alternately dark and uplifting.” Berlin has been a muse for many artists, currently with the popular German television show Babylon Berlin and Jason Lutes’s comics collection Berlin. Fitzgerald quotes Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories published in 1945. Berlin itself is a character in Drawn to Berlin, and Fitzgerald interweaves history and cultural context with the present-day narrative. Drawn to Berlin is a collection of anecdotes about people seeking solace, distraction , or instruction from Fitzgerald’s comic workshops. The overarching narrative, however , is Fitzgerald’s as she contemplates her own role and the role of art in the uncertain lives of these refugees. Fitzgerald is transparent about her mistakes and assumptions, and Drawn to Berlin is a compelling story about an individual’s and a city’s responsibility to those seeking refuge and comfort. Claire Burrows Austin, Texas César Aira Prins Barcelona. Literatura Random House. 2018. 137 pages. Depending on who keeps count and what his various publishers do, Prins is César Aira’s 101st book and 71st novel, and by the time this review is published, there will be more of his challenging prose. Praised by Patti Smith for reasons similar to her acclaim of Bolaño, the sole living Argentine master habitually makes incompleteness and opacity an ingenious contrapuntal homage to his sometime masters. Afflicting the comfortable, he avers that breaks with the past, like the Duchampian avant-garde he favors, may not be as radical as believed. He also assays realism in theory and practice —finding no paradox in preferring it to commercial fiction—and asserts he doesn’t read younger contemporaries. Prins is a search for authentic thrills, like many of Aira’s previous short novels. If the “autobiographical” is difficult to confirm in them, like Prins, the recent Una Aventura and El gran misterio can be termed homeopathic performances, a detectable turn in most of his novels available in English translation . Even when there is no empirical “there” there, a bifurcated “César Aira” pops up, dazzlingly compulsive and hilarious in his novelistic trials. Given that backdrop, Prins and its loose plot reveal a subtext: the healing power of literature as a topic of concern for literati worldwide, from Walser to Aira and motley millenials. Like the narrators in El gran misterio, Aira’s goal is not to knock down doors but to try many keys at random, reduce the unknown, but not before analyzing whatever “the great mystery” is. In that regard, Prins surges from an urban legend, the architect Arturo Prins, whose plan to build a gothic university in downtown Buenos Aires about a century ago displeased him and everyone involved, aesthetically and financially. Frustrated by his uncompleted masterwork and bad luck, he killed himself. Patrick Modiano Sleep of Memory Trans. Mark Polizzotti Yale University Press French novelist Patrick Modiano returns with his first book since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, in which he reflects on love and life lost in semi-autobiographical fashion, accentuating the fleeting fragility of human life. Modiano’s signature voice evokes people and place masterfully, stirring readers to reflect on their own experiences and relationships, inviting them to search deep within themselves for similar existential revelations upon conclusion of the novel. Leanne O’Sullivan A Quarter of an Hour Bloodaxe Books Leanne O’Sullivan hails from the Beara Peninsula in Cork, Ireland. Inspired by the harrowing experience of her husband’s brain infection diagnosis and subsequent coma and memory loss, O’Sullivan’s fourth collection of poetry allows a glimpse into the world from the perspective of one cut off from all previous knowledge of it. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 99 Aira turns that story into one about a writer of commercial gothic novels who, aware of his work’s puerility, stops writing . He spends his time consuming opium, delivered by a dealer adamant to stay in the narrator’s house indefinitely. Meanwhile, his ghostwriters have become a criminal Buenos Aires gang that acts according to standard gothic tales they had written before (in interviews...

On the Beara Peninsula: Written in Stone

On the Beara Peninsula: Written in Stone

Safe House, and: Sparrow

Safe House, and: Sparrow Leanne O’Sullivan (bio) When they were beginning to build a countrysome of the men came to hide in a housewhere there was a family, and a child upstairs,listening. They told him what to say if anyone ever asked. Say they were never there.Say there was only a family in that house.And during the night the boy went to the roomwhere their bags and belongings were hidden. He felt along the canvases, the mouldy wetand sag of the straps. His fingers touched onpapers and coins, and lifted out the revolver,its coolness and the weight of it in his hands. Then he felt nothing. His blood crept slowlyand dark along the floorboards, underneath them,and the room shook, and stood still,and seemed to hang for a moment in that night. When they found him they cleaned him,his face, gently and quickly, and his motherwrapped him in a blanket and took himout to a corner of the farm and buried him. Back in the house they gathered his things,and built up a fire again in the kitchen,burning his clothes, his shoes, all the signsand small, clumsy turnings of a child. And afterwards, in the freezing dark, the fatherwent out to find the doctor and the parish priestto tell them what had happened, and what theyshould say if anyone ever asked. [End Page 321] Sparrow That one who came tapping at the window,brown-suited, upright at dawn, my fathersaid was his father flown home for summerto help outside where our help wouldn’t do,and began to wink and talk to the old manabout changes here, the new cow house,or how he broke those lower fields into one,keeping always straight and almost serious. That was remembered again today, stirredin the spring-ground of the milking shedwhere light softens beyond the stallsand shafts, and I heard a song thrush call,bright, unexpected and familiar.Where I turned, and almost began to answer. Leanne O’Sullivan Leanne O’Sullivan was born in 1983 and comes from the Beara Peninsula in West Cork. She is the author of three poetry collections, published by Bloodaxe Books—Waiting for My Clothes (2004), Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009) and The Mining Road (2013). She has been the recipient of several awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award (2009, nominated by Michael Longley), The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (2010), The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry (2011), and the UCC Alumni Achievement Award (2012). She is currently Writer in Residence at University College Cork. Sparrow: “Safe House” and “Sparrow” are reprinted courtesy of Bloodaxe Books. Both appear in The Mining Road, which was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland in April 2013, and will appear in the United States in September. [End Page 322] Copyright © 2013 Irish American Cultural Institute

A mantle-derived dolomite silicocarbonatite from the southwest coast of Ireland

AbstractThe magma source and evolution of a zoned breccia pipe on the southern Beara Peninsula in southwest Ireland are investigated using the geochemistry of the host mineral assemblages. The clast-poor inner zone of the pipe has a magnesium-rich silicocarbonatite whole-rock composition (14.30 wt.% MgO; 31.80 wt.% SiO2). The silicocarbonatite has retained an ultimate mantle source 13C isotopic composition after metamorphism, consistent with the presence of mantle debris. The silicocarbonatite is Cr-, Ni- and Co-rich (847 ppm, 611 ppm and 60 ppm, respectively) but REE depleted compared with volcanic dolomite carbonatites worldwide. The mineral assemblage consists of Sr-rich (0.55 wt.% SrO) ferroan dolomite, magnesite and pseudomorphs of chlorite after phlogopite, consistent with derivation from a carbonated and hydrated mantle. However, chrome spinel crystals (≤4 40.14 wt.% Cr2O3) are compositionally indistinguishable from unmetasomatized spinel macrocrysts in kimberlites. The silicocarbonatite is inferred to represent a magma produced by partial melting of metasomatized mantle at physical conditions between those in which primary dolomite carbonatite and ultramafic magmas of high-pressure origin form. The primary silicocarbonatite magma ascended and sampled mantle material in a manner similar to kimberlite, and subsequently lost volatile components due to release of metasomatic fluids and later metamorphism.

Padraig And Lorcan

Lorcan, Padraig replied, if I grant that there is merit in your 'overarching treatise' (and I see you have been in my new stash of books), what about our customary monetary concerns? Why the fuck have you had me lugging around this sack of discarded metal vessels, drained of their libations it is the poet in me that eulogizes them so when you don't even want to get some money back? I mean, we owe it to ourselves, no? As citizens. Late of the Beara Peninsula. And of Cleveland, usa. Two entrepreneurs, down on their luck, in southwest Detroit. We've already paid for the deposit. Or are you a man insistent on financial suicide? Lorcan stared at his slightly less disheveled companion, he of the cleanshaven face and, weirdly, bloodshot-free eyes, and thought what he normally thought of Padraig in those final moments before his friend/box-mate passed out, with his glorious knack of never having his head land in the fire that emanated from a flower pot on the towel-covered, asphalt floor of their park95 ing lot abode. Padraig. God knows we've scammed our way left and right across the flat-chested middle of this country. Let me make two points. Point the first: you're a twat. Lord love a twat, though, when the twat honestly believes he has been pressed into the service of his art, as you do. No matter that you're horrible at it. But fear not: I have an opportunity for us to redress this matter. Which brings me to point the second: it is time for us to give back to this community from which we've profited over the years. A grand communal gesture is incumbent upon us. There was no wind, but the other bums scattered in groups of two or three around the disused drive-in theater premises were all in agreement that there had never been a colder late October. It was the stuff of everyone's conversation. Even straight-laced Don Mulch so named because he had worked as a mulch spreader for Don's Proprietary Landscaping (a favorite of wealthy hedge-fund funded widows) was drinking a good two bottles of Listerine a day to keep the cold out. Profited? You told me last winter after we made our escape from Cleveland with the coppers only just a tad too dumb to find us that if my finger didn't turn back to a flesh color in the next fourteen hours (and what

Periglacial trimlines and the extent of the Kerry-Cork Ice Cap, SW Ireland

Periglacial trimlines on the mountains of SW Ireland demarcate a contrast between glacially scoured bedrock on lower ground and thick periglacial regolith covers on summits and plateaus, and have previously been interpreted as marking the maximum altitude of the Kerry-Cork Ice Cap (KCIC). Glacially eroded bedrock extends to the highest points on the Beara peninsula, but the highest summits on the Iveragh Peninsula support thick regolith covers. Trimline altitudes on the Iveragh Peninsula decline radially from a former ice divide near the head of Kenmare River, from ∼700 m altitude near the divide to ≤470 m near Dingle Bay. Contrasts in the clay mineral content of above- and below-trimline soils and cosmogenic isotope exposure ages indicate a LGM age for the trimlines. Assumption that the trimlines represent the maximum thickness of the KCIC implies an ice divide altitude of ∼825 m. However, modelling of ice-surface profiles demonstrates that an ice divide at 825 m is irreconcilable with stratigraphic evidence for extension of the KCIC at least as far as Garryvoe, 115 km east of the divide. We infer that the Iveragh trimlines represent a former englacial transition between warm-based sliding ice on low ground and cold-based ice on high ground rather than delimiting nunataks as previously interpreted. Modelling of ice-surface altitudes suggests that during the LGM the KCIC probably overtopped all of the mountains in SW Ireland. The trimlines of SW Ireland thus define the minimum rather than maximum altitude of the KCIC at the LGM, as well as the sites of former ‘cold patches’ within the KCIC.

Fine-spatial Paleoecological Investigations Towards Reconstructing Late Holocene Environmental Change, Landscape Evolution, and Farming Activity in Barrees, Beara Peninsula, Southwestern Ireland

Long-term environmental change and human impact have been reconstructed at fine spatial and temporal resolutions in an archaeologically rich, and floristically interesting, part of southwestern Ireland, namely the Beara peninsula, County Cork. Detailed pollen and macrofossil analyses, and radiocarbon dating have been carried out on several short peat monoliths, and on a peat core and a lake core from small basins. Landscape evolution, vegetation dynamics, and farming activity from the end of the Neolithic (c. 2500 B.C.) to the present day, i.e., the period of greatest human impact in southwestern Ireland, have been reconstructed. While significant opening-up of the landscape began relatively early in the Bronze Age (between c. 2400–2100 B.C.), the main woodland clearances took place in the later Bronze Age (beginning c. 1400 B.C. and continuing into the Iron Age, i.e., to c. 400 B.C.). In the mid- and later Iron Age, there was considerable fine-scale spatial variation, with activity being concentrated mainly in the uplands (at c. 200 m asl) and at lower elevations. Radiocarbon dating and pollen evidence show that the linear stone-wall system, now partly obscured by shallow peat, was laid out towards the end of the Iron Age (c. A.D. 400) in the context of a largely open landscape. While the initial foci of bog growth appear to relate to the late Neolithic/beginning of the Bronze Age, widespread development of blanket bog was essentially a phenomenon of the late 1st/early 2nd millennium A.D. It was probably favoured by wetter and cooler conditions during the Little Ice Age. Detailed records are presented for the filmy ferns, Hymenophyllum tunbrigense, H. wilsonii, and Trichomanes speciosum, and also Myrica and Ulex, both shrubs with pronounced, oceanic distribution patterns.

A chronology of foreland deformation: ultra-violet laser 40Ar/ 39Ar dating of syn/late-orogenic intrusions from the Variscides of southwest Ireland

The Upper Palaeozoic sedimentary rocks of the Munster and South Munster Basins, southern Ireland, lie within the Rhenohercynian Zone of the European Variscan orogeny. This foreland region accommodated shortening during the Asturian phase of Variscan deformation at the end of the Carboniferous by the development of kilometre-scale and lower order folding, high angle reverse faulting and regional fabric development. At the southwestern extremity of the belt lies the Black Ball/White Ball Heads area of the Beara Peninsula where high-level igneous intrusions locally exhibit a close relationship with both the ductile and late brittle phases of Variscan deformation. 40Ar/ 39Ar ultra-violet laser analysis of phlogopite crystals from these intrusions (principally trachytic dykes) has yielded ages that, when combined with structural field relationships, help to constrain the timing of Variscan deformation in southern Ireland. These ages include 314.44±1.00 Ma for a penetratively deformed lamprophric pipe on Black Ball Head, 301.98±1.47–298.08±0.61 Ma for dyke material associated with later stage brittle deformation and a date of 296.88±0.60 Ma for an undeformed post-orogenic dyke on White Ball Head.

A Late Namurian (318Ma) $^{40}Ar/^{39}Ar$ Age for Kaersutite Megacrysts from the Black Ball Head Diatreme: An Age Limit for the Variscan Deformation in South-West Ireland

The Black Ball Head diatreme on the Beara Peninsula (Co. Cork, south-west Ireland) intrudes Lower Carboniferous marine siliciclastic sediments, and comprises an inner and an outer zone of pyroclastic infill. The outer zone is dominated by lithoclasts of local sediments and igneous rocks, whereas the inner zone is characterised by an assemblage of kaersutite, phlogopite and Ti-magnetite megacrysts and ultramafic pyroxenite nodules. $^{40}Ar/^{39}Ar$ step-heating dating of two kaersutite megacrysts from the inner zone yielded a c. 318 ± 3Ma plateau age (2σ). This late Namurian age is interpreted to be the age of diatreme emplacement. The pyroclastic infill is foliated and the c. 318Ma age therefore provides an older age limit for the Variscan deformation in this part of the Rhenohercynian fold belt.

A Late Namurian (318Ma) 40Ar/39Ar Age For Kaersutite Megacrysts from the Black Ball Head Diatreme: an Age Limit for the Variscan Deformation in South-West Ireland

The Black Ball Head diatreme on the Beara Peninsula (Co. Cork, south-west Ireland) intrudes Lower Carboniferous marine siliciclastic sediments, and comprises an inner and an outer zone of pyroclastic infill. The outer zone is dominated by lithoclasts of local sediments and igneous rocks, whereas the inner zone is characterised by an assemblage of kaersutite, phlogopite and Ti-magnetite megacrysts and ultramafic pyroxenite nodules. 40Ar/39Ar step-heating dating of two kaersutite megacrysts from the inner zone yielded a c. 318 ‘ 3Ma plateau age (2ao). This late Namurian age is interpreted to be the age of diatreme emplacement. The pyroclastic infill is foliated and the c. 318Ma age therefore provides an older age limit for the Variscan deformation in this part of the Rhenohercynian fold belt.

Irish Immigrants in Michigan's Copper Country

Large-scale emigration from Ireland has been a fact of life for many generations, both before, and especially after the Great Famine. Those Irish men and women who arrived in the United States were part of a vast dispersal of people whose native land was no longer able to sustain them. Most, especially during the early years of migration, stayed in the coastal cities where they had landed and there found work. Their particular story has been well told by historians.1 Others ven tured inland along the canals and railroads they helped build, settling along the way as opportunity arose,2 Their story is beginning to be better understood. Still others ventured even farther afield and established communities far from the coastal cities. Their story is less well known and only recently beginning to be told.3 Immigrants to one such area far from the coast, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, are the subject of this article. These Irish miners came from copper mining areas in the Beara Peninsula of County Cork, the Knockmahon mines in County Waterford, and mining communities in County Tipperary. Their expe rience as skilled workers deserves attention it has not yet received. It is hard to imagine a place more different from Ireland than the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Ireland is known for its many shades of green; meterol

Miners in Migration: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Irish and Irish-American Copper Miners

WHAT forces compelled so many in postfamine Ireland to resettle in North America? With an emigration rate more than double that of any other European country, Ireland in this period has received considerable scholarly attention. (1) Yet most studies focus on larger structural forces--chiefly capitalist transformation of agriculture from tillage to pasture--to neglect of local conditions and role of specific migration links between Ireland and America. Allied to this, Irish-American community studies seldom determine where precisely in Ireland their subjects originated or what, beyond larger structural forces, compelled them to emigrate. While not centered on study of Irish migration, David Emmons' award-winning Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925 asked important question: Where specifically in Ireland were Irish in his story from? Emmons concluded that the Irish-born among Butte's thousands of Irishmen were principally drawn from idle copper mines of Cork and from landless farm laborers and small farmers of of Ireland. (2) He based his conclusion on place-name association, noting that six most common Irish surnames in Butte closely associated with Co. Cork. (3) To support his place-name association evidence, he also cited Riobard O'Dwyer's genealogical studies of Beara Peninsula, a copper-mining district in Cork, which confirmed considerable migration to Butte. (4) In a more recent work Emmons returned to Cork-Butte nexus and again concluded that concentration of Corkonians in Butte was historical accident, citing as further evidence that West Cork had had only copper mines in Ireland, at Hungry Hill, near Allihies. (5) What Emmons did not realize is that nineteenth-century Ireland contained several copper-mining districts, two of which (Knockmahon in Waterford and Avoca in Wicklow) equaled or exceeded Allihies in both production and number of workers engaged. (6) While Emmons and O'Dwyer demonstrated a strong migration link between Beara Peninsula and Butte, existence of additional Irish copper districts raises important questions. Did other mining districts send such numbers to Butte? If not, why? Moreover, while Emmons asserted that County Cork in southwestern Ireland supplied a hugely disproportionate share of Butte's population, (7) it must be remembered that Cork was Ireland's largest county and produced by far greatest number of emigrants in this era. (8) It is therefore reasonable to assume that Cork surnames predominated in many other Irish-American communities. This essay will also explore that supposition. Emmons' scholarship has made an indispensable contribution to our understanding of Irish in America. His discovery of chain migration between copper districts in Cork and Butte invites further investigation into migration patterns of nineteenth-century Irish copper miners. This essay endeavors to offer such an investigation. Its objectives are fourfold: first, to present a brief narrative on Irish copper mining and role of Irish copper miners in development of two primary nineteenth-century American copper ranges, Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula and Butte, Montana; second, to offer a more precise method of determining surname frequency in Ireland; third, to apply this refined method to Beara Peninsula and two other major Irish copper-mining districts, Knockmahon and Avoca; and, finally, to correlate surname frequency of three primary Irish copper-mining districts to surname frequency of both Butte and Keweenaw Peninsula. To determine surname frequency in Ireland, this study will utilize indexes to Griffith's Valuation, (9) which, owing to shortage of other complete Irish records, often serves as a substitute census. (10) Taken between 1848 and 1864, survey lists all householders and lessees by parish, no matter how small, and occupant and value of each separate piece of property. …

Controls on magmatism in the Munster Basin, SW Ireland

Abstract The following paper is intended as a review of the magmatism in the Munster Basin and an initial attempt to link it with the basin’s history. During the initiation, evolution and inversion of the Devono-Carboniferous Munster Basin magmatic activity was widespread, although small in volume. The episodic occurrence and diversity of the magmatism gives insights into the basement involvement and structural controls relating to the basin’s history. The differences in composition, location and structural relationship of the magmatic bodies are used as indicators for the timing of their emplacement and their relationship to the basin’s evolution. On the western Beara Peninsula in SW Ireland alone, more than 160 sheet-like intrusions, a wide variety of tuff bands and a deep-seated pipe-like structure of lamprophyric affinity occur. Other centres of magmatism in the basin are the Lough Guitane area, where rhyolitic lava flows and acidic pyroclastic rocks are associated with contemporaneous basin faults, and the Valentia Harbour area, where doleritic sills are associated with a volcanic breccia. A rhyodacitic tuff can be traced as far as St Finan’s Bay on the western shore of the Iveragh Peninsula. The chemical composition of the extrusive and intrusive magmatic bodies ranges from tholeiitic dolerites (Valentia Harbour) and subalkaline rhyolites (Lough Guitane) in Mid-Devonian time to subalkaline basalts and tuffs (e.g. Beara Peninsula) in Late Devonian time. In Late Carboniferous and possibly Permian time alkali basalts, trachytes and phonolites (e.g. Beara Peninsula) occur. The igneous activity in the Munster Basin is linked to the basin’s history by the interaction between active faults and fractures opening up during various stages of stress imposed on the basin and exploitation of these faults and fractures by rising magma.

Wide-angle seismic control on the development of the Munster Basin, SW Ireland

Abstract Three wide-angle seismic profiles were acquired from onshore southern Ireland during VARNET-96. These data provide the only subsurface seismic images of a series of predominantly Late Palaeozoic sedimentary basins. The Dingle Basin is a broadly symmetrical rift on the Dingle peninsula, but assumes a half-graben geometry to the east. The southern syn-rift basin margin is defined by the north-dipping Dingle Bay-Galtee Mountains Line. A south-dipping normal fault at Kerry Head marks the northern basin margin in the west, with displacement on this structure decreasing towards the east. The Dingle Basin is separated from the Munster Basin to the south by a basement horst. Seismic data strongly suggest that the Killarney-Mallow Fault Zone, located on the southern margin of this positive feature, is the Munster Basin northern syn-rift marginal fault. The preserved extensional displacement on this detachment decreases from c. 2.5 km in northern Iveragh, to c. 1 km at Mallow, suggesting that the fault tips out to the east of Mallow. A tilted fault block, possibly cored by shallow granite, is imaged in the northern Munster Basin. This fault terrace is bounded to the south by the Cork-Kenmare Line. The combined Munster Basin and South Munster Basin succession thickens across the Cork-Kenmare Line to a maximum thickness of 8 km on the Beara peninsula. A tectonic thickness of 6 km of sediment is modelled at the Old Head of Kinsale, increasing to 7 km in the southwest.

Carboniferous subvolcanic activity on the Beara Peninsula, SW Ireland

Magmatic activity associated with the Munster Basin has been more widespread than previously reported. The Munster Basin is a substantial sedimentary basin, and towards the end of its extensional phase of development, at the beginning of the Variscan orogeny in Ireland, numerous intrusions were emplaced into consolidated Upper Devonian and Lower Carboniferous sediments on the Beara Peninsula. One hundred and sixty-four sills and dykes have been mapped which are subalkaline to alkaline in nature. Two separate suites have been identified. The northern suite comprises subalkaline basalts of Cod's Head and Dursey Island which are intruded into Devonian Red Beds, and the southern suite comprises alkali basalts, trachytes and phonolites which crop out along 9 km of the south coast of the Beara Peninsula and are suggested as Brigantian in age. They are intruded into Devonian Red Beds and marine Lower Carboniferous strata and are therefore later than the tholeiitic magmatism on the Iveragh peninsula to the north. The alkaline magmatism on Beara was induced by lithospheric thinning and controlled partly by pre-existing zones of weakness in the Caledonide crust and partly by fracture zones that developed parallel to the Munster Basin margin as it subsided. In contrast to the Iveragh Peninsula, the stretching factor for the Beara lithosphere was never large enough to lead to the production of tholeiitic magmas. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Stratigraphy and structure of Devonian fluvial sediments, western Beara Peninsula, south‐west Ireland

AbstractA stratigraphic and structural summary of 5 km of Upper Devonian strata of south‐west Beara, part of the Munster Basin, south‐west Cork is presented. Five formations are recognized on the basis of lithofacies geometries and associations. The lowest Caherkeen Formation comprises rapidly alternating sheet‐like, plane‐bedded, low‐angle, cross‐bedded sandstones and laminated, rippled or desiccated mudrocks. The incoming of thin lenticular sandstone packages, commonly with high‐angle cross‐bedding, distinguishes the overlying Eagle Hill Formation. The succeeding Reen Point Formation comprises thicker bedsets of plane‐bedded, low‐angle and high‐angle cross‐bedded sandstones, separated by thick, massive mudrocks. Intraformational breccias and calcareous nodular siltrocks are distinctive features. The Tholane Formation is characterized by thick massive red‐green mudrocks and a general absence of coarser grained lithologies. This sequence was deposited in a terminal fluvial fan in a basin characterized by decreasing subsidence rates and gradient with time. The overlying Toe Head Formation represents the deposits of a fluvial coastal plain. It has siltrocks that are predominantly green, often with preserved fish and plant debris. There is a relative absence of high‐angled cross‐bedded sandstones and an abundance of flat‐laminated and inclined parallel‐laminated sandstones.The structure of the Beara Peninsula comprises a WSW plunging anticlinorium with a single cleavage formed during the Variscan orogeny. Evidence from locally transecting cleavages and from mapping indicates dextral transpression. Development of the three main fault trends was contemporaneous with the folding. The well‐known copper mineralization of the Allihies area is associated with east‐west fault trends, a pattern observed elsewhere in the western Munster Basin. Basement involvement during both basin development and deformation is likely, but is difficult to test.