Cultural Heritage of Mourne AONB

Since the last Ice Age, man has altered the land around the Mournes to make a home for himself. Early Celtic settlers began the process of clearing land for agriculture while their roving herds of cattle and goats were the first domestic livestock to roam the hills. In former centuries, before today's farmland patterns were established, wealth was reckoned in terms of cows. Families moved with their animals to the mountain pastures from May to September. Only in the nineteenth century did sheep replace cattle in the hills.

At around the same time, an expanding population living on the land and the clearance of rough grazing for arable crops and potatoes led to the collapse of seasonal mountain grazing (called booleying). By the eighteenth century the use of granite as a building stone and its suitability, when cut and fashioned, for use as millstones, lintels, window-sills and door-steps gave rise to great local skills in splitting and 'dressing' stone.

Late in the nineteenth century better means of transport and an improvement in the type of cutting wedges used - consisting of a small iron wedge or 'plug' - made possible an export trade in dressed stone. Paving-setts, kerbstones, foundation blocks and stone monuments left the Mournes for use in new road and dock constructions in Belfast and Liverpool and Mourne granite is claimed to have 'paved Lancashire'.

Field and Farm

The farmland landscape of the Mournes is a result of centuries old agricultural practices. The earliest farmers began the laborious process of clearing the land of its Ice Age legacy of countless granite boulders. With the use of seaweed as field manure and lime to reduce soil acidity, the area under cultivation spread throughout the lowlands and pushed slowly up hillsides. Gradually the landscape which we associate with Mourne farmland became established, of which nothing is more evocative than the network of drystone walls - called ditches - which criss-cross the coastal plain. The skills which built them are still very much alive today.