For thousands of years the climate of Valencia Island in County Kerry has favoured the formation of peat. As the bogs expanded and deepened they swallowed up houses, cooking-places and walls of the prehistoric peoples who occupied the island. Early man gradually cut away the dense woodlands that covered the whole island so that by the time of the birth of Christ it was already treeless, and then turned to the bogs for fuel. Today, the peat cuttings reveal traces of the prehistoric walls that have been cut through by the diggers. Tracing through the land and these cuttings, Frank Mitchell has...